GS

Shoot down that flag

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

For 38 years, the US paid farmers NOT to grow too much corn. In 1971, one guy killed that rule. Within 13 years your Coke had corn syrup instead of sugar, food was the cheapest it had ever been, and Americans were getting heavier every year.

Since the Great Depression, US farm policy ran on simple supply and demand. If everyone planted everything, prices would crash and farmers would go broke. So the government paid farmers to leave a chunk of their land empty, and held big stockpiles of grain like an emergency fund.

Then Nixon picked Earl Butz to run the Department of Agriculture. Butz was a farm-economy professor from Indiana who also sat on the boards of giant food companies. He told farmers to "get big or get out" and to plant every inch of land they owned. In 1972, when the Soviet Union had a bad harvest and came shopping, Butz quietly sold them 30 million tons of grain in one deal. The US emergency stockpile was gone overnight. By 1976 he had killed the entire 38-year-old system.

By the late 1970s, the country was drowning in corn, and Washington kept guaranteeing the prices anyway. Corn became the cheapest ingredient in the American grocery store. The government still hands corn farmers about 3.2 billion dollars a year, more than any other crop.

That cheap corn went two places. The first was your soda. Scientists had recently figured out how to turn corn starch into a syrup that tasted almost like sugar. With corn this cheap, that syrup (high-fructose corn syrup, or HFCS) was way cheaper than cane sugar. Coca-Cola started swapping it in by 1980. By 1984, Coke and Pepsi had ditched cane sugar entirely in the US. The average American went from eating zero corn syrup in 1970 to almost 38 pounds of it a year by 1999.

The second place was everything else. That same cheap corn fed the cows, pigs, and chickens packed into industrial farms. It also became the base ingredient or sweetener in most processed food on the shelf. Americans went from spending 17 percent of their take-home pay on food in 1960 to under 10 percent by 2000, one of the lowest rates in the world. Daily calories per person climbed from about 2,054 in 1970 to over 2,500 by 2010. The extra 500 came mostly from added fats, refined grains, and corn syrup. When Butz took office in 1971, about 15 percent of American adults were obese; today the CDC says it's 40.3 percent. Severely obese, defined as way past overweight, used to be under 1 percent. Now it's nearly 1 in 10.

Butz's policy did exactly what it promised. Productivity, exports, and grocery prices all moved the way he said they would, year after year for three decades. The right photo is just what happens to the average American body after fifty years of policy designed to make calories as cheap as possible.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

If you pitched this as a screenplay, every studio would reject it for being too on-the-nose.

Fernando Mendoza was a 2-star recruit ranked 2,149th in his high school class. Zero FBS scholarship offers. Not one. He walked on at Cal, fought for a starting job, transferred to Indiana for his senior year, then led them to 16-0 and the first national title in school history. Heisman, Walter Camp, Maxwell, Davey O'Brien, Manning, Big Ten MVP. 41 TDs, 72% completion, 8-to-0 TD-to-INT ratio in the playoffs.

The Raiders took him #1 overall Thursday night. $54.56M fully guaranteed. Only the third player ever to win the Heisman, win a national championship, and go first overall the next spring. Burrow. Newton. Mendoza.

Then he skipped Pittsburgh.

The biggest stage in football, the moment every kid imagines from the second they pick up a ball, and Fernando watched the call from his living room in Florida because his mom Elsa is in a wheelchair and the travel is hard for her. She was diagnosed with MS when he was 4. She wrote a letter to her sons in The Players Tribune in 2015 promising the disease "won't affect us in the ways that matter."

The part nobody talks about: while every other top pick was on stage, Fernando announced the Mendoza Family Fund the same day. $500K personal donation to the National MS Society. Committed to raising $1M over three years. He hasn't taken an NFL snap and he's already given more to a cause than most players donate in a full career.

He and his brother Alberto have already raised $360K through the Mendoza Bros. Burger at BuffaLouie's in Bloomington. At Christmas, he handed four families dealing with MS $10,000 each for an Adidas shopping spree.

Both his parents are children of Cuban refugees who fled Castro. His dad rowed at Brown, won a Junior World Championship in 1987, and played high school football in Miami next to a teammate named Mario Cristobal. Fernando beat his dad's old teammate in the national championship game in January.

Every athlete talks about playing for their family. Fernando actually did it.

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

🚨: A 9-year-old girl, Shreyovi, won an international photography award with an incredible shot.

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

Some dudes go to the draft
Some host draft parties
Some get drafted while they’re playing a round with the fellas

Kaden Wetjen is already a legend

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

The highest mountain in the solar system and Phobos, a moon of Mars.

https://t.co/mvuP2CRh5O

[Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism @beyond_capital]

You’re not two paychecks away from a private jet. You’re two missed paychecks away from food stamps. Stop defending billionaires. They’re not defending you.

[GS @GS_UK91]

@AdamSchefter 7 tweets on the same contract extension.

[James Fishback @j_fishback]

It is evil to turn to a single mom and say we don’t have money for you and your child, but we have money to send to Israel. As Governor, I’ll divest from Israel and reinvest in our communities. https://t.co/wnQwuGcjxl

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

🚨: For the first time, we are observing plants breathe in real time.

[Chronos Intelligence @ChronosIntelX]

🧬 The claim is real! and the mechanism is more precise than the headline suggests.
All blue eyes trace back to a single mutation in the OCA2 gene on chromosome 15, which occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago most likely in a population near the Black Sea. Before that mutation, every human on Earth had brown eyes.
The mutation doesn't add blue pigment. It switches off the gene that produces melanin in the iris reducing production without eliminating it entirely. Blue eyes have no blue pigment at all. The color is structural: light scattering off the colorless iris produces blue the same way the sky appears blue.
Every blue eyed person alive shares that one ancestral switch. A single point mutation, carried forward across 400 generations.
📌 Source: University of Copenhagen, Hans Eiberg et al., Human Genetics, 2008

[James Fishback @j_fishback]

Politics is about trade-offs.

I will trade away billions from Blackstone, for your right to buy a home and raise a family.

[Shadow of Ezra @ShadowofEzra]

A “Save the Children” protest has now started on Hollywood Blvd and has begun with demands to execute elite pedophiles and shut down satanic Hollywood.

While the numbers are small for now, it is expected to grow and spread across the country until pedophiles are no longer safe.

“These pedophiles have got to go.”

🎥 @Right_Now_Views

[Zero Point Energy Disclosure @ZPEdisclosure]

A YouTube channel with 680,000 subscribers has been building "free energy" generators on camera for years.

The Liberty Engine Project.

They build them from car alternators, microwave transformer coils, neodymium magnets, and a 220V motor.

They disassemble them on camera to prove there are no hidden batteries.

They run them outdoors — powering grinders, water pumps, drills, heaters — for hours.

680K people are watching this. The physics establishment is pretending it doesn't exist.

[James Fishback @j_fishback]

My Statement on Iran

[Carrie Prejean Boller @CarriePrejean1]

Americans need to make a promise to never to elect another Israel funded traitor ever again.

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

🚨: A 72-hour prolonged fasting can activate a profound process of regeneration of the immune system ─ FASTING 72 HOURS COULD "RESET" YOUR IMMUNE SYSTEM, research reveals

[Financial Physics @FinancialPhys]

Today is a great day to remind everyone 🙂

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

You’re welcome. It’s not a hoax.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

1/ 🚨 JEWS ARE BUILDING A SECRET POLICE FORCE IN FLORIDA: HB 945 creates a “counterintelligence” unit to spy on, neutralize, and ARREST you for “views or opinions” they decide are “inimical” to the state. No crime needed. The ONLY corporate lobbyist is an Israeli spyware firm.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

6/ “Conservative” Florida is handing power to a jewish-linked foreign intel outfit to build a police state on our dime. This bill must die NOW. Flood your reps, RT like hell, and expose this before it passes. Florida is NOT becoming Tel Aviv’s surveillance playground.