Valerie Morris ⚕️🩺 🇮🇪

How to really love a child. Credit: @motherhood_and_montessori

There is an order of nuns in Spain who are currently going viral because they are saving a breed of GIANT rabbits from extinction

There is a question every history teacher could ask their class and almost none ever do. Why grain? Why, of all the foods a human being can eat, did every early state on earth, Egyptian, Sumerian, Chinese, Roman, Aztec, Inca, build its tax base on grain. Not on cattle. Not on fish. Not on tubers. Not on the protein-dense, calorie-dense, nutrient-complete foods that humans had been thriving on for two and a half million years before anyone planted a seed in a row. Grain. The answer is not that grain was the most nutritious. It demonstrably was not. The skeletal record of every population that transitioned from foraging to grain agriculture shows the same pattern. Average height drops by four to six inches in a generation. Bone density collapses. Dental caries appear for the first time in the human archaeological record. Iron deficiency, vitamin A deficiency, vitamin D deficiency, all of them appear in the bones of the first farmers and not in the bones of the foragers they replaced. The answer is not that grain was easier to produce. Hunting a deer in a temperate forest is, calorie for calorie, considerably more efficient than ploughing, planting, weeding, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and milling a field of wheat. The forager spent four hours a day on subsistence. The farmer spent twelve. The answer is taxation. Grain is the most legible food a state has ever encountered. It ripens at a known time, in a known place, in a known field, owned by a known farmer. It is harvested all at once. It is countable. It is storable. It is divisible. A tax assessor can stand at the edge of a field in August, look at the standing wheat, estimate the yield within ten percent, and know exactly how much the man who farms it owes the state when the threshing is done. You cannot do this with a cow. The cow walks. The cow can be moved. The cow can be hidden in the woods when the assessor arrives. The cow gives milk on a schedule the assessor cannot predict and meat at a moment of the farmer's choosing. The cow does not ripen. The cow does not present itself for counting. The cow is, from the perspective of a state trying to extract a percentage of the food supply, an administrative nightmare. You cannot do this with a fish either, or a deer, or a wild pig, or any of the other foods a free human being might eat in a landscape that has not yet been carved into rectangles for the convenience of a clerk. James Scott, the political scientist who wrote this analysis up in detail, called grain the foundation of state legibility. The state can see grain. The state cannot see anything else. And once the state has built itself on grain, the state needs grain. Needs it badly. Needs every farmer in its territory growing it, paying it, depending on it, because the moment the farmer can feed himself on cattle or pigs or fish or the wild boar in the forest, the farmer has options. The farmer with options is not a taxpayer. The farmer with options is a man who can walk away. So the state does what every state has done for six thousand years. It privileges grain. It subsidises grain. It builds its temples around grain. It ascribes moral virtue to grain. It tells the farmer that the eating of bread is the mark of a civilised man and the eating of meat the mark of a barbarian. It restricts hunting. It encloses the commons. It taxes the cow at a rate the farmer cannot pay so the farmer sells the cow and buys the grain. Six thousand years of this. And then a nutritional establishment funded by grain processors and seed oil manufacturers tells you, in 2026, that the optimal human diet is grain at the base of a pyramid and red meat at the top in a sliver too thin to read. They did not invent the lie last week. They inherited it. From the first man who ever stood at the edge of a wheat field with a clipboard.

Feta cheese, the protected designation of origin product that Greece has been quietly making for three thousand years, is by EU law made from at least 70% sheep milk and up to 30% goat milk. Not cow milk. Specifically not cow milk. There is a reason for this. Cows do not thrive on the limestone hills of mainland Greece. The terrain is too steep, the grazing too sparse, the summers too dry. A cow placed on a Greek hillside in August will look at you with the expression of an animal that has been deeply misunderstood. Sheep and goats are, however, fine. Sheep handle the slopes, goats handle the scrub, and between them they convert a landscape that grows almost no human food into the cornerstone protein and fat of an entire civilisation. The Mediterranean diet, currently sold in supermarkets as a kind of vague olive-oil-and-tomato lifestyle, was historically a sheep-and-goat-and-bread-and-occasional-fish diet. The olive oil was a condiment. The cheese was the protein. The cheese was made from animals that lived on land that produced nothing else. When Greek hospitals studied centenarians on the island of Ikaria, they found the dietary common factor was not the olive oil. It was the daily consumption of goat milk, goat cheese, and herbs gathered from the hillside the goats had been grazing. The longevity wasn't olive-derived. The longevity was goat-derived. The marketing department got there first.

@BirdyBooky A colleague & I stood at Navan Hospital after gender neutral toilets opened there. We conducted a survey over 3 or 4 hrs & asked visitors & staff alike if they agreed with them or not. 98% said they did not. Emailed the manager after & she said it was @HSELive policy

These are the toilets in Harold’s Cross Educate Together Secondary School. Fully open to the corridor and with male and female symbols on every single door. The school has, helpfully, laminate a couple of pieces of paper with arrows written on them saying ‘Male’ and ‘Female’. The only sinks are in the middle of the floor with no wall between them. I suppose the laminated signs are the school’s attempt at a compromise as there was uproar from the students a couple of months ago when plans revealed that every single toilet block and cubicle is mixed sex. Only people who are completely oblivious to the needs and desires of teenage girls especially, for privacy and dignity would make teenage girls share toilet facilities with teenage boys like this. It’s either ignorance or something more sinister - a complete disregard for the rights of half of the population. Educate Together my arse. What about girls and boys from countries, cultures and religious backgrounds for whom these shared facilities will be entirely unacceptable? They will self-exclude from schools like this. Everywhere where mixed sex facilities have been imposed on teenagers like this, girls have ended up physically ill because they will stop drinking water during the day because they won’t use these facilities. @hcetss @Education_Ire @1Hildegarde Why have exclusionary toilet facilities been adopted in this publicly funded school?

Make no mistake, when US Lyme Disease cases increase from 30,000 in 2020 to 456,000 in 2025, THIS IS BY DESIGN. And coincidentally, Gates has financial stake in Pfizer on a new LYME DISEASE VACCINE being released in 2026. AND he's against people eating red meat and believes that cows contribute to the climate crisis. AND...he doesn't believe in planting trees (his own words). He thinks he's a scientist, but all he really is - an uneducated, power-hungry, political hack, with a lot of money. A very dangerous combination. Farmers, ranchers and hunters have found hundreds of these metal boxes left in fields and wooded areas filled with millions of ticks. And wildlife is dying from tick infestation at rates never seen before. Ticks cause the following health issues; Lyme Disease Alpha-gal Syndrome- causing severe allegory to red meat by the bite of the Lone Star Tick. Anaplasmosis - bacterial infection, causing fever, headaches, and muscle pain. Babesiosis caused by parasites that infect red blood cells, can be severe. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever - A serious disease that requires prompt medical attention. Powassan Virus - A rare but severe virus that causes brain inflammation.

Just days after Prof Francis Boyle agreed to testify against Bill Gates & Albert Bourla over the deadly COVID mRNA shots...he was FOUND DEAD. Boyle authored the US Bioweapons Act & called the mRNA injections 'Bioweapons & Franken-Shots.' Where does the Pentagon fit into this?... Just when you thought you’d heard it all, this resurfaced interview with Prof. Francis Boyle—the man who literally WROTE the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act—will leave you speechless. He states on record that both SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA injections were DARPA-funded offensive bioweapons programs from the start. Gain-of-function? That was the cover story. According to Boyle, the real goal was always “lethal yet vaccinate-able” population reduction tech. And yes, he names names: UNC, Wuhan, Fauci, Daszak, Baric…the whole club. He goes further—calls the shots “synthetic biological weapons of mass destruction” because they trigger autoimmune carnage, prion-like misfolding & turbo cancers. Boyle filed lawsuits, begged Congress & warned the world. Just 20 days after agreeing to testify for the prosecution, he was found dead. The same pattern we’ve seen with dozens of doctors & whistleblowers since 2020. Pure coincidence? If a man who drafted the actual law defining bioweapons says we just lived through the biggest biowarfare attack in history…why isn’t every news channel screaming this from the rooftops? The most chilling part? Boyle predicted exactly what we’re seeing now: myocarditis, strokes, infertility & cancers exploding in the injected. He said the spike protein itself is the weapon & the lipid nanoparticles were engineered to cross the blood-brain barrier. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a military-grade kill vector dressed up as “public health.” So here’s the question that keeps me up at night: Who gave the order? Who profits the most? And when do the Nuremberg-style trials begin?

How Ireland Works 🇮🇪: The Irish Gov Blocks Natives From Returning To Their Own Islands While Paying Non Nationals Irish Tax Payer MoneyTo Bribe Non Nationals To Move There: In 2023 grants of up to 84,000 euro were offered to people from India and other nations to come and relocate to this very beautiful Irish island below (and others). The same government (through local councils) is now denying the right of NATIVES of those specific islands to return to their home (from the mainland or beyond) and build a house on THEIR OWN PROPERTY because they haven't shown a good enough reason why they want to return to where they were raised. This is replacement in real time that we are witnessing. The people who are denied the right to live on the soil on which they were raised are paying tax for non nationals to be coaxed into taking their place. One of the quoted reasons for the grant scheme is to "revitalise population levels on the islands" and "diversify island economies" See here: gov.ie/en/department-… The project is called OUR LIVING ISLANDS and is directed at non nationals. At the time CNN reported: "New opportunities are afoot for those dreaming of fixing up a rural idyll far from the chaos of modern life. Ireland has just announced a scheme to revitalize more than 20 of the idyllic islands that lie off its western seaboard, including Inis Mór, whose breathtaking landscape you might recognize from the Hollywood hit “The Banshees of Inisherin,” as well as 10 Irish-speaking Gaeltacht islands. Increased grants of up to €84,000 (nearly $92,000) will soon be offered to people willing to refurbish vacant or derelict homes and then live in them, with Vacant Home Officers now on the case to identify eligible properties. Would-be islanders should be aware that while there are no restrictions on who can buy property in Ireland, owning a place doesn’t guarantee you the right to live there [ie. Visas would need to also be applied for, BUT the scheme WOULD make it an easier process essentially]. The government website has the latest deets on the Our Living Islands policy and the existing refurbishment scheme."

NHS SPENT MILLIONS SILENCING SIX DOCTORS. EVERY SINGLE ONE WAS RIGHT Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews called them the Super Sextet. Six doctors and executives who saw dangerous things happening in NHS hospitals, raised the alarm, and were systematically destroyed for it. Not one of them was wrong. Every single concern turned out to be valid. Dr Kim Holt @drkimholt warned Great Ormond Street Hospital that the child protection clinic in Haringey was dangerously understaffed and missing patient records. Management put her on special leave for four years. Baby Peter Connelly died. The trust spent £286,000 on consultants to investigate itself and found no management failings. Then it offered Holt £120,000 to sign a super-gag and disappear. She refused. Steve Bolsin, cardiac anaesthetist at Bristol Royal Infirmary, spent six years documenting that children were dying at an entirely avoidable rate during heart surgery. He raised it internally. He raised it with the Department of Health. He was told to keep his head down. Between 30 and 35 children died unnecessarily. Bolsin was described at a European surgeons conference as the most hated anaesthetist in Europe. He left the UK in 1995 and never came back. Ash Pawade turned around a catastrophic children's heart surgery unit in Bristol. When a baby died after an overworked perfusionist made a drug error caused by NHS staffing cuts, Pawade backed his colleague and called management to account. He was ordered to apologise for impugning the trust's legal team. He left the NHS without any recognition. Dr Raj Mattu, a world-renowned cardiologist in Coventry, watched a patient die because five beds had been crammed into a ward designed for four, leaving three beds with no access to oxygen or suction. He reported it. A senior manager responded by saying he wanted Mattu off the road completely. Mattu was suspended for six years, then sacked. The trust spent over £14 million of public money trying to discredit him. He was eventually awarded £1.22 million. The CEO who oversaw the campaign against him was given a CBE. Gary Walker was brought in to turn around United Lincolnshire Hospitals Trust after seven CEOs in six years. He balanced the books and hit the targets. When a winter surge led clinicians to warn that patient lives were at risk, Walker wrote to his Strategic Health Authority. The SHA's chief executive emailed back: you need to meet targets whatever the demand. Walker was sacked in 2010 for gross misconduct. The gross misconduct was using the f-word nine times in three meetings over two years, not directed at anyone in particular. Dr Peter Wilmshurst, consultant cardiologist at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital, spent 30 years reporting research fraud, confronting pharmaceutical companies, and taking on anyone who put profit above patient safety. He was sued for libel three times by a US medical device company after accurately reporting that their product did not work. The legal battle nearly cost him his home. The same playbook runs across all of them: suspend the whistleblower, bury them in vexatious complaints, pay management consultants to clear management, offer a gag clause, and wait for the person to break. @NHS spent millions silencing these six people. Not one manager faced meaningful consequences for any of it. Source: Shoot the Messenger, Private Eye @PrivateEyeNews Special Report by Dr Phil Hammond @drphilhammond and Andrew Bousfield

The purpose of art was once not to shock or transgress, but to elevate the soul.

Voiceover, hushed, the unmistakable tone of David Attenborough, slow strings underneath: "Here. On a quiet Herefordshire field. In the soft light of an October morning. We see something truly remarkable." Camera pans across a damp field. Settles on a cow. "This. Is Gerald." Gerald is chewing. "Gerald is a four-year-old Hereford cross. To the untrained eye, he appears to be standing in a field. But what we are in fact witnessing, in real time, is one of the most catastrophic ecological events of our age." Gerald takes a step. "Each footfall. Compresses the soil. Each mouthful. Removes a precious blade of grass that might otherwise have grown into a magnificent, carbon-sequestering meadow. Each exhalation. Releases a molecule of methane into our fragile atmosphere." Gerald exhales. "Here. We see it. The very moment of impact." Cut to a graphic of a melting glacier. "The consequences. Are unimaginable." Cut back to Gerald. Gerald is now lying down. "And yet. Even now. He continues. He shows no remorse. He has not signed the petition. He has not read the latest report. He does not, as far as we can determine, follow the relevant accounts on social media. He is, by every available metric, complicit." Gerald does a pat. "There. The damage is done. Released into the soil. Where it will, in a process scientists are only beginning to understand, decompose. Become part of the earth. And, troublingly, grow more grass." The grass, in the background, grows. "This grass. Will be eaten. By Gerald. The cycle. Continues." A skylark lands on Gerald's back. "Even the wildlife. Has been compromised." Cut to graphic: ten-thousand-square-metre solar farm in Oxfordshire. "There. Is. Another way." The skylark flies off Gerald to the solar farm and lands on it briefly. The solar farm is silent. Nothing grows. The skylark looks confused. The skylark returns to Gerald. "Even the bird. Resists progress." Cut back to Gerald. Gerald has not moved. Gerald is asleep. In the run-time of the documentary, Gerald has grazed roughly four square metres of pasture, sequestered an unmeasured but substantial amount of carbon into root systems beneath him, fertilised the soil he is lying on, supported a skylark, and produced, as a side effect of being alive, several pounds of beef. The production company has produced fourteen minutes of footage and an Instagram post. Only one of them is leaving the field better than they found it. Gerald is unavailable for further comment. Gerald is in Herefordshire. Where he has been all along.

Eduardo took eleven minutes to cross the field this morning. The field is approximately 130 metres long. Eduardo, if he had wanted to, could have crossed it at a brisk alpaca walk in about three minutes. He did not want to. He stopped at the gorse bush. He stopped at the small section of clover near the gate. He stopped at the place where the badger crosses, which is not currently active but which Eduardo, by some assessment of his own, considers worth checking. He stopped at the dip where the rainwater pools, drank slightly, walked on. He stopped at the eastern fence post for ninety seconds and looked, by every visible indicator, at nothing in particular. He arrived at the far gate at 7.46am. The farmer, watching from the kitchen, made a cup of tea. The farmer's wife, who has watched Eduardo cross this field most mornings for seven years, said: "He's slow today." The farmer: "He's slow every day." The wife: "He's slow on purpose." The farmer: "...Yes." This is the thing about Eduardo. The eleven minutes is not inefficient. The eleven minutes is the work. The work is to walk the field, attend to it, notice what has changed, register the gorse and the badger crossing and the dip and the fence post, and finish at the far gate having processed the morning. Most useful animals, and most useful humans, work like this. The work is in the noticing. The noticing requires time. The time looks, to the casual observer, like the animal is doing nothing. The animal is not doing nothing. The animal is doing the most important part. The phone in your pocket has, in the last decade, optimised the noticing out of most modern lives. The walk to work has become the scroll on the bus. The lunch has become the working lunch. The slow look at the eastern fence post has become the answered email. Eduardo has not, at any point, optimised the noticing out. This is, in the long run, why Eduardo is fine and you are tired. Walk the field slowly. Notice the gorse. Be the alpaca.

A man on a hiking trail walked past Doris this morning. He was new to the area. He had come up for the weekend, was working through a guidebook recommendation, and was, by his own quiet admission, having a hard time of it. He had not, in his planning, factored in the gradient. He sat on the stile by Doris's lower wall at approximately 10.40am. He took out a water bottle. He looked at the fell. He looked at his map. He looked at the fell again. Doris was on the upper section, into the wind, doing the thing she does. The man watched her for a few minutes. He drank some water. He breathed slowly. The wind moved across the grass in the way wind does on the Lakeland fells, which is to say with the kind of sustained patience that makes a person reconsider their relationship with effort. He sat there for half an hour. He has not, as far as Brian is aware, told anyone what he was thinking about. He started walking again at 11.10am. He went up. He made the summit by 1pm. He came back past Doris on the way down, slowed at the wall, looked at her, nodded once, and continued. Brian saw the whole thing from the kitchen window. He has not, in thirty-one years on this farm, come up with a simpler description of why the fell matters. The fell is a place where a person can sit on a wall, watch a sheep, and decide to keep going. That is, in the end, most of what the British countryside is for. The countryside cannot do this if there is no fell. There is no fell without grazing. There is no grazing without Doris. Defend the working landscape. The man on the stile is the reason.

The best moisturiser in the world is beef tallow, and it is currently sitting in a butcher's chiller in Lancashire, wrapped in greaseproof paper. Every British farmhouse between approximately 1700 and 1950 had a small jar of it on the washstand. It was rendered from the suet around the kidneys of the Sunday joint. Strained through muslin. Set into a pale yellow wax that smelled faintly of the field the cow had grazed on. The jar lasted six months. It cost nothing. It went on the chapped hands of a woman who had spent the morning hanging washing in a January wind. On the cracked heels of a farmer who had been out in his boots since dawn. On the baby's bottom when the nappy rash flared. On the elbows of a child who had been in the bath. On a husband's face after he had shaved with a cut-throat razor and lukewarm water. One jar moisturised the entire household. Beef tallow is roughly 50% monounsaturated fat, 40% saturated fat, with a fatty acid profile almost identical to the sebum your own skin produces. It carries vitamins A, D, E, and K, conjugated linoleic acid, and palmitoleic acid, which the human skin cell uses directly. It absorbs without sitting on the surface. It does not oxidise. It does not require a preservative because it is, structurally, already stable. This was discovered, by every farming household in Britain, by accident, over the course of approximately three hundred years. It was replaced, in the British bathroom cabinet, sometime between 1955 and 1985, by an industrial moisturiser containing water, glycerin, mineral oil, dimethicone, phenoxyethanol, sodium hydroxide, fragrance, and seven other ingredients written in a font small enough to require a magnifying glass. The skincare industry, currently valued at £130 billion globally, has spent the last fifteen years quietly rediscovering tallow as a "clean beauty" innovation, packaging it in small amber jars with hand-drawn labels and selling it back to the granddaughters of the women who used to keep it on the washstand. The cow is still in the field. The butcher will give you the suet and look pleased that anyone asked. Render it down on a Sunday afternoon. Strain it into a jam jar. Keep it on the washstand. Your skin will work out the rest.

And there you have it

Japan: longest life expectancy on the planet (around 85 years). Plant-based advocates: "See? Rice and vegetables!" Japan's actual diet: Seafood: by far the most consumed animal protein, around 45-50kg per capita annually Pork: the most consumed land meat Chicken: a close second Beef: expensive but eaten regularly, and prized Eggs: among the highest per-capita consumption on Earth, often raw on rice Dashi (fish stock): the base of nearly every savoury dish on the table Roughly half of Japanese protein comes from animal sources. Their longevity gets pinned on the rice. Meanwhile they're eating fish at almost every meal, drowning their vegetables in fish stock, cracking eggs into breakfast, and treating beef like a luxury good worth saving up for. The fish is the meal. The rice is there to mop up the dashi. Acknowledging any of this would mean admitting that the longest-lived population on Earth eats half its protein from animals. And that conclusion doesn't fit the pamphlet. So they point at the rice. Hope nobody asks what's on top of it.

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up. He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour. Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself. Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it. Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows. Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result. Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing. The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

On this day in 1916, Irish Freedom Fighter Joseph Plunkett was executed Plunkett played a significant role in efforts to have his relative Oliver Plunkett beatified Before he died, Joseph Plunkett wrote this famous poem about Jesus: 'I see his blood upon the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes, His body gleams amid eternal snows, His tears fall from the skies. I see his face in every flower; The thunder and the singing of the birds Are but his voice-and carven by his power Rocks are his written words. All pathways by his feet are worn, His strong heart stirs the ever-beating sea, His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn, His cross is every tree'

🚨🇺🇸 Meanwhile in America “Look at them crawling out of there - millions of Ticks” The story is so insane - Farmers continue to report finding Boxes full of Ticks on their farmland, clearly left their on purpose. Now the US has already seen a sharp increase in the number of Tick related diseases.

Walk across an arable field of British wheat in summer. Count the species. You will find: wheat. Possibly a few resistant weeds the herbicide didn't catch. A handful of crows. Some pigeons surveying for damage. Roughly nothing else. Walk across a properly managed permanent pasture in the same county. You will find: 30 to 60 plant species in a good sward. Wildflowers. Clover. Vetches. Plantain. Ryegrass and timothy. Foraging bumblebees. Skylarks nesting in the longer patches. Hares in the margins. Beetles, dung beetles in particular, doing the work of two ecosystems at once. Field voles, kestrels overhead waiting for them. Swallows hoovering up insects above the cattle. The cattle are the reason the second field is biodiverse. Their grazing maintains the open structure. Their dung feeds the invertebrate web. Their hooves create the disturbance ground-nesting birds require. Remove the cattle, the pasture turns to scrub, and the species count crashes. The farm with the cows is the wildlife refuge. The farm with the wheat is the empty room. This is the inversion that nobody who writes for a Sunday supplement has worked out yet.