Two Dead Mice

I adore this. Words alone can’t convey how much I love this.

What’s actually stopping you from making $51/hr with just a GED as a Coalman at Basin Electric’s Antelope Valley Coal Station…owning this affordable family home in Hazen, ND… and spending your summers swimming and fishing at Beulah Bay with a camper spot? Full benefits that include a 15% employer retirement match on your 5% BTW 👀 Too cold? No downtown club life?

@jonmeier8 @brim006 That’s hilarious!

@brim006 @mtbeverly81

Somewhere in North Dakota! @brim006

@liquid_rigidity @brim006 Thanks. We can go just about anywhere with it.

@mtbeverly81 @brim006 That's a damn sweet setup!

If you haven’t figured it out by now, our entire government is a huge mafia who launders our tax payer money right back to themselves through foreign aid and endless wars. They all hate you and could care less if you suffer and die horrible deaths, as long as they get dirty rich.

@brim006 Could be. I didn’t know paradise was so close.

@mtbeverly81 I see a few aspen trees so it’s gotta be the turtle mountains somewhere. Likely Lake Metigoshe State Park? 😎

I want to introduce you to Steve. He’s 83. His wife died a few months ago and he comes to this lodge in Spring Mill, Indiana and draws. He taught art in Terre Haute, IN his whole life. He also did courtroom sketches in court cases. In the comments I’ll share some pics from his sketchbook. He was excited when I said I was going to share his sketches with the world.

A yellowjacket in June is a fairly docile pest controller. A yellowjacket in late August wants to fight you for a soda. Same insect, but the colony has changed. All summer, the workers hunt protein. Caterpillars, flies, and other garden pests get chewed up and fed to the larvae back in the nest. In return, the larvae provide the adults with a sugary secretion that fuels the workers. So all season those workers are out killing the bugs eating your tomatoes because that's how they feed the babies that feed them. A single colony removes thousands of pest insects. Then late summer arrives. The colony reaches peak population. The queen shifts from producing mostly workers to producing males and next year's queens. Fewer larvae remain, and as those larvae pupate, the workers lose much of their built-in sugar supply. Now you have a huge population of aging wasps searching for carbs wherever they can find them. Fallen fruit, hummingbird feeders, your picnic, your soda, anything sweet. They're not suddenly mean. They're just hungry, unemployed, and nearing the end of their lives. You'd be itching to fight for a piece of candy too. By winter, the old queen, workers, and males are dead. Only newly mated queens survive to start fresh colonies the following spring, and old nests are almost never reused. A nest tucked away in a field corner or high in a tree is doing free pest control for a few more weeks, then it's gone. The nests worth dealing with are the ones in doorways, walls, or places where people, especially anyone with a severe allergy, could be at risk.

The year is 1949. The Nobel Prize in Medicine has just gone to the man who invented the lobotomy. Your doctor suggests one for your sister, who has not been herself since the baby came. It is the most celebrated advance in psychiatry of the age, and he is simply current. By the time the prize curdles into an embarrassment, close to twenty thousand Americans have had the operation, and proportionally more here in Britain. The year is 1956. Lay the baby down on his front, the doctor says. So does the most trusted childcare book ever written, the one on every new mother's shelf. On his back he might choke, the reasoning goes. Millions obey. The advice holds for nearly thirty years, long after the evidence has quietly turned, and a generation of cot deaths is counted before anyone thinks to roll the babies over. The year is 1966. A bestselling book informs your wife that menopause is a disease, that she is, in the author's word, a castrate, and that a small daily pill will keep her youthful and tolerable to live with. Her doctor agrees. The drug becomes one of the most prescribed in the country. Nobody mentions that the author sat on the payroll of the company that made it. That detail surfaces decades later, in the same year the landmark trial is halted early for raising rates of breast cancer, stroke and clots. The year is 1979. Your ulcer is caused by stress and sharp food, the doctor explains. Calm down, drink milk, take the antacid that happens to be the best-selling medicine on earth. Two Australians are about to prove that most ulcers are caused by a bacterium and cured by a fortnight of antibiotics. The profession laughs. One of them eventually drinks a beaker of the stuff to settle the matter. The establishment takes the better part of twenty years to stop laughing. The Nobel lands in 2005. The year is 1985. Butter is dangerous, the doctor says. Switch to margarine, it is modern, it is heart-healthy, the experts are united. The spread he nudges you toward is loaded with trans fats, which the next decade will identify as the genuinely dangerous one, and which will eventually be banned outright. The butter goes quietly back in the fridge. No correction is ever printed at the volume of the original warning. The year is 1992. There is a pyramid on the surgery wall, and the very same one in your grandchild's classroom. Bread, cereal, rice and pasta form the broad virtuous base, up to eleven servings a day. Fat is exiled to the tiny tip. The chart was reportedly held back a year while the relevant industries had their say. It is wrong at the bottom and wrong at the top. Now it is today. Your doctor has new guidelines, new studies, a fresh consensus, delivered with precisely the steady confidence of every guideline above. He believes it, and he has good reason to. So did every doctor in this thread. None of them were villains. Each was sincere, most were kind, and all were certain, reading from a map that somebody else had drawn and handed them. That is the part worth sitting with. So when the man in the white coat tells you what to eat, what to fear, and what to swallow every morning for the rest of your life, you are allowed to ask. Who paid for the study. What the evidence says beneath the headline. What he was just as certain about thirty years ago, and where that advice sits now. Then make up your own mind. Call it scepticism, or call it whatever your grandmother called it when she ignored the advert, kept the butter where it was, and lived to ninety-one. It has outlasted every consensus on this list. It will outlast this one too.

USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen. I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify. In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather. "Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully. "Honey, that's what it looks like." The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it." I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it. I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South. It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent. "Well?" the waitress asked. "I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed." "Everybody does, hon." Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it. Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating. I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden. It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.

@JimEspy It’s not summer anymore, it’s just fire season.

There’s a fire that’s pretty much directly south of us just north of the Hayden CO airport. It’s going to be a very long summer.

A single ragweed plant can release hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions, of pollen grains. The wrong plant takes the blame for it. When your eyes start itching in September, you look around and the thing you see blooming is goldenrod, tall and bright yellow on every roadside. So goldenrod gets cursed and torn out. But goldenrod is innocent. Its pollen is heavy, sticky, and built to ride on the bodies of insects, far too heavy to float into your nose. About the only way it reaches you is if you press your face into the flower. The real culprit is often growing right next to it, unseen. Ragweed blooms at the same time, but its flowers are small and green and easy to miss, and its pollen is light enough to travel for miles on the wind. Ragweed is one of the leading triggers of seasonal allergies in North America, especially in late summer and fall. Meanwhile goldenrod provides late-season nectar for bees and other pollinators heading into fall. Removing it does nothing for your allergies, but it does take away an important food source for wildlife.

Yes!!

It’s inspiring to see the brethren within our Adamic Race, from Ireland, Scotland and even England on the streets, keep resisting tonight.

MASSIE: “The Israelis napalmed the deck of the USS Liberty and then machine-gunned the lifeboats. They were intent on leaving no survivors.” It took 59 years for the USS Liberty survivors to even be recognized by our occupied government. God bless Thomas Massie.

I seemed to have missed this in the Legacy Media.

Saddest, most truthful aspect of industrial farming. Montana’s most fertile soil is becoming subdivisions for out of staters.

@DyerMatthewD @totusjustice Thank you for the clarification on which Bible.

@totusjustice This is a clip from the Nave's Study Bible. Written by Orville J. Nave. I have a copy in my library.

"There is nothing in the Bible forbidding inter-racial marriage." The Bible:

Few illustrators captured the of the English countryside as beautifully as Jill Barklem (1951–2017). Born in Epping, Essex, Barklem studied illustration at St. Martin's School of Art and spent years researching local flora and fauna before creating her masterpiece: Brambly Hedge. Children love to pore over her intricately detailed watercolor illustrations, which depict beautifully the homes of mice and voles inside trees and burrows throughout the seasons. The books have sold more than 7 million copies worldwide and remain beloved classics. Recommended titles: 📚 Spring Story 📚 Summer Story 📚 Autumn Story 📚 Winter Story 📚 The Secret Staircase 📚 The High Hills In an age of simplistic, garish, and jarring imagery for children, Barklem's work teaches us to slow down and look carefully.