Commercial advertising, product placements, and corporate-sponsored promotions are explicitly prohibited on national parklands. The White House lawn is a unit of the National Park System. It also violates standard Anti-Vending and Solicitation Laws as well as misuse of public funds and government endorsement ethics. Everything this administration does spits in the face of our laws. Everything is a grift.
Everyone always talking about “talent density” in Silicon Valley when we really should be talking about how 80% of pretzels in America come from a small region of Pennsylvania
Slavery was so long ago and we’re supposed to be over it until you want to have an image of the resistance of enslaved people, then it’s too political. They will never forgive Haiti for winning their freedom. They made Haiti pay France reparations for 150 years and still salty.
“A family from Mexico arrives this morning legally has as much right to the American Dream as the direct descents of the Founding Fathers.”
Bob Dole accepting the Republican nomination for President in 1996.
"Look at the faces. It was kicked there on purpose. The jump was to disrespect the country"
Conservatives deeply unwell people. To them, daring to have fun in a park is a conspiracy against the state and must be met with violent force
On one side, you have a seasoned journalist with decades of credibility and colleagues who can speak to his integrity, on the other, you have a lifelong bullshit artist who has failed upward by flattering the powerful. I just don’t know who to believe.
There are only 35,000 venus flytraps left in the swamps where they grow. Poaching is killing them off.
Venus flytraps grow naturally in only one place on Earth: a 90-ish-mile radius around Wilmington, North Carolina. Wild populations have collapsed due to habitat loss, fire suppression, and decades of poaching for the houseplant trade.
Stealing them from the wild has been a felony in North Carolina since 2014, punishable by 25 to 39 months in jail. Conviction-rate enforcement is slow, and a poacher can still dig up several hundred plants in an afternoon.
Here's how to tell a nursery-grown flytrap from a poached one (US Fish & Wildlife Service guidance):
1. Look at the tray. Nursery-grown plants are propagated through tissue culture, so they're uniform in size. If the plants in the tray vary noticeably in size, some of them probably came from the wild.
2. Look at the soil. Nursery soil is uniform, sterile peat moss. If the soil has sand, gravel, or natural debris mixed in, that's wild soil.
3. Look at the pot. Nursery-grown plants come in clean pots. If there are other small plants, mosses, or "weeds" growing in the pot, the flytrap was likely dug from a bog.
If you want one and want to do it right, buy from a specialist carnivorous plant nursery. California Carnivores, Plant Delights Nursery, and FlytrapStore (in the US) all sell exclusively tissue-cultured plants. Big-box stores and roadside vendors are the highest-risk sources.