Mother: "Is raw milk really all right for children? My health visitor went white when I asked."
Farmer: "What did you feed them first?"
Mother: "Breast milk."
Farmer: "Did you heat it?"
Mother: "No."
Farmer: "That was raw milk. Full of antibodies and live proteins that teach a baby's immune system what to ignore. Cow's milk carries the same sort of thing, until it's heated."
Mother: "And heating does what?"
Farmer: "The legal test for pasteurised milk is that one of its enzymes is dead. That's how they know it's done."
Mother: "But does any of it matter?"
Farmer: "Germany, Austria and Switzerland wanted to know why farm children get so little asthma and hay fever. They followed over 8,000 of them."
Mother: "I'd have guessed the fresh air."
Farmer: "So did they. It was the milk. Children on raw farm milk had about 40% less asthma, whether they lived on a farm or not."
Mother: "Could be it's just fresher."
Farmer: "They checked. Boil the same milk and the benefit goes. It tracked with the whey proteins the heat destroys."
Mother: "Mine have had a cold since September."
Farmer: "They followed babies as well. A third fewer colds and ear infections in the ones on raw milk."
Mother: "So I'm not being reckless."
Farmer: "You're asking for what every child got until about 80 years ago. From a herd that's tested every quarter and inspected twice a year."
Mother: "Why did nobody tell me any of this?"
Farmer: "There's no rep for it. I've a cow and an honesty box."
Mother: "Four litres."
Farmer: "There's two children. I'd make it six."
You’re not allowed to use the word “brave”.
You dodged the draft during Vietnam.
Then enlisted in the Marine Reserve to guarantee you would not deploy to Vietnam.
Then you claimed to have served in Vietnam.
You’re a disgrace.
Stop encouraging others to die, when you didn’t have the guts to put your life on the line.
Absolutely **phenomenal** from @JoelWebbon. Bravo.
Huckabee thought he'd throw out a threat, a false accusation, and use his political power to intimidate and silence a U.S. Citizen.
Turns out, Webbon isn't someone you want to try to silence, because he took Huckabee's threat and false accusation and metaphorically beat him like a red-headed stepchild (or disloyal diplomat) with the truth.
Webbon writes...
"Ambassador, calling for the arrest and harassment by law enforcement of a law-abiding American taxpayer, in no uncertain terms, is a whole other level of treason - even greater than you've already committed.
I’ll have you know, America has a proud history of calling for the heads of public servants who betray We the People. Our nation was founded upon the precept. It is one of the prouder aspects of our glorious heritage. And on December 3, the Department of Defense will execute a man at Fort Hood for being a traitor.
You are no less a traitor.
And in the end, the dead from your treason will be far higher than the victims of his handgun. You have committed treason on a grand scale, on foreign soil, betraying your oath of office and the people who commissioned you to do the job that you have sat in Jerusalem, doing for a different nation altogether.
And people have died as a result - not just countless Christians thanks to illegal settler violence, who are carrying out the precepts of Talmudic Judaism that declare Gentile lives to be worth nothing - but Americans in Gaza, not “caught in the crosshairs” as though they are collateral damage, but shot on purpose through the head with a sniper’s bullet, another shot through the shoulder blades while wearing a press jacket, and another was dragged behind a car until they died.
And all of them, murdered while Israel knew there was an American ambassador in Jerusalem who would not defend his people, but instead, defend Jewish Palestine.
The Bible says in the watchman passage of Ezekiel that if it’s your job to warn of danger and no one listens, it’s on them. But if you don’t warn of danger, then that blood is on you.
“But if the watchman see the sword come, and blow not the trumpet, and the people be not warned; if the sword come, and take any person from among them, he is taken away in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at the watchman’s hand.”
What should be required at your hand, Ambassador? You were the watchman. You chose not to sound the alarm. And God has spoken.
You are washed in the blood, Mike. But not the blood of Christ - but the blood of Christians. It cried out from the ground, and you tried to quiet it...
But now, an American pastor has criticized your conduct, and you have applauded the call for his arrest due to his free speech.
It appears Israel has rubbed off on you.
Political prisoners aren’t allowed in the United States, Ambassador. You’re confusing your one true love, Israel, with the United States. Your affection for Jewish Palestine appears to have survived every inconvenience except an American Citizen insisting that you answer for your disloyalty.
You’re not angry about dead Americans. You’re not angry about dead Christians. You’re angry that YOU must be held to account.
But sir, this is America, and you have forgotten who we are. You were appointed to represent Americans abroad, including Americans who reject your politics and dispute your perverted theology. The office belongs to the nation, and you have sullied it with the stench of anti-Gentile hatred and treason. Frankly, we’ll be damned before we let you remake America into Israel’s image."
Link below. Audio is available.
DEGENERATE COWARDS
That’s how the founders and old revolutionaries viewed people who refuse to protect and defend their own constitution and their own liberty
Out of fear for their own skin or a lazy preference for comfort
As Thomas Jefferson put it, they’re “timid men” who “prefer the calm of despotism to the tempestuous sea of liberty”
Gotthard Heinrici might be the most underrated German general of WW2. He was arguably the best defensive commander of the war, and most people have never heard of him.
He was small, quiet, and devoutly religious, which made him unpopular with the Nazi Party. His troops called him "our poison dwarf."
Heinrici spent most of the war on the Eastern Front, where he perfected a simple trick. When his intelligence signaled a Soviet offensive was coming, he would quietly pull his men out of the front line the night before. The Soviet artillery would spend hours pounding empty trenches. Then the attacking infantry would walk forward into his real defensive line, fully intact.
In late 1943 and early 1944, his 4th Army held off a series of major Soviet offensives near Orsha despite being badly outnumbered.
By March 1945, the Red Army was on the Oder River, about 50 miles from Berlin. Hitler had given command of the army group defending that sector to Heinrich Himmler, who had no real military experience and was out of his depth. Heinrici was brought in to replace him.
On April 16, Marshal Zhukov launched his assault on the Seelow Heights with one of the largest artillery barrages in history, backed by searchlights meant to blind the defenders.
Heinrici had done it again. He'd pulled his men back the night before. The barrage hit mostly empty ground. The searchlights reflected off the smoke and dust and blinded Zhukov's own troops. A battle the Soviets expected to win quickly took three days and cost them tens of thousands of dead.
But Heinrici had no illusions. The war was lost. He refused to throw away his men defending Berlin street by street, and kept steering his forces west so they could surrender to the Americans and British instead of the Soviets.
Hitler's high command relieved him of command days before the end.
He spent three years as a POW and lived until 1971. The man who made the Red Army pay for every mile to Berlin is barely a footnote today.
Diocletian issued the Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 AD and immediately made criminals out of half the Roman Empire.
The edict fixed maximum prices on +-1,000 goods and services, from wheat and wine to haircuts and legal fees. Violators faced death. The emperor genuinely believed that merchants were gouging war-weary citizens, and that a sufficiently stern imperial decree could override the laws of supply and demand. Supply and demand cannot be overridden by decree.
Prices carry information. When Diocletian debased the silver denarius to fund his military campaigns, prices rose because the currency was worth less, not because merchants were conspiring against the common Roman. The edict attacked the symptom while the debasement continued. Sellers faced a choice: sell at a loss or don't sell at all. Rational people chose the latter. Goods vanished from markets. Farmers slaughtered livestock rather than sell meat at mandated prices that fell below their production costs. The historian Lactantius wrote that the resulting shortages and chaos exceeded the original problem the edict claimed to solve.
Black markets appeared within weeks. Trade moved underground, to back rooms and private arrangements where actual scarcity and actual demand set prices honestly. Enforcement proved impossible because the incentive to trade privately outweighed the risk of punishment for most participants. The state had simply added transaction costs and danger to commerce it could never actually stop.
Diocletian repealed portions of the edict within a few years, though the broader monetary rot continued until the Western Empire's collapse. You cannot decree prosperity into existence by threatening the people producing it.
Today, 1700 years later, politicians still repeat this lesson. Some people simply will never learn.
In 2014 a firefighter in Massachusetts was diagnosed with cancer. His wife went looking for the cause, and found it in the suit that was supposed to protect him.
Diane Cotter is not a scientist. Her husband Paul had served in Worcester for 27 years. Cancer is now the leading cause of death in the line of duty for American firefighters, and she wanted to know why.
She started with the kit. A modern firefighting suit is made of synthetic fibre and treated to shed water and oil. She wrote to manufacturers and got nowhere. So she posted pieces of gear to a physicist at Notre Dame and asked him to test them.
He found the fabric loaded with fluorinated compounds, the "forever chemicals", at levels he had not seen in any consumer product. They came off on the hands. They were in the dust of the fire stations.
The makers had known what was in it. The firefighters had not. The union has since told its members to wear the suits only when they have to, and the lawsuits are in the courts now.
The same laboratory then tested something else. Children's school uniforms sold as stain resistant. Every one contained the chemicals, and the uniforms had more than almost any other children's clothing. The label on many of them said 100% cotton. The treatment was not on the label.
A fleece sheds rain because of the wax the sheep puts on it, and resists a stain because of the way the fibre is built. It has done so for 10,000 years without a chemist.
We took that property, tried to fake it with a coating, and put the coating on firemen and five year olds.
Imagine losing your airplane because you didn’t check if your passenger was carrying beer!
That actually happened to a pilot in Alaska. Officials took his plane and won't give it back.
He’s "been fighting to keep his plane for 14 years," says @m_greenberg1 of @IJ.
Full story:
Here is what I can now prove beyond any doubt happened to my bank, as the facts are documented in contemporaneous emails between the IRS and ATO.
1. OCIF had no intention of shutting down my bank, as there was no legitimate regulatory purpose for doing so.
2. The IRS, on behalf of the ATO and other J5 nations, put pressure on the OCIF Commissioner to shut down my bank as a demonstration of the J5’s ability to disrupt tax evasion and money laundering wherever in the world they were taking place.
3. Because the J5 investigation itself found no evidence that my bank was actually doing anything to facilitate tax evasion or money laundering, the IRS convinced OCIF to hold a global press conference so that the J5 could frame my bank for committing those crimes and take credit for putting a stop to them.
4. As a result of that pressure, and to further the publicity objectives of the J5 and OCIF, the OCIF Commissioner manufactured a regulatory pretense to shut down the bank that enabled all parties to fraudulently use that action to demonstrate their effectiveness at combating tax and money laundering crimes.
5. Lastly, what I suspect from the emails, but cannot yet prove, is that Nick McKenzie of The Age and 60 Minutes was behind the ATO’s efforts both to get my bank shut down and to announce the action with a global press conference. I believe he was motivated by his need for evidence to defend against my defamation lawsuit, which he lost anyway. That means that, had I never sued him for defamation, my bank never would have been shut down.
U.S. regulators just fined Bank of America $1.2 billion for admitted anti-money-laundering violations, including failure to report more than $5 billion in suspicious activity, with transactions potentially tied to Chinese money-laundering networks, narcotics trafficking, and fraud. Yet there was no press conference held to announce the fine, nor was Bank of America shut down.
In contrast, no regulators fined my bank for anything related to money laundering, as an extensive investigation did not find a single suspicious transaction my bank failed to report. Yet regulators held a press conference to announce the suspension of my bank and offered the closure as evidence to demonstrate their power to disrupt money laundering on a global scale.
The tulip mania of 1637 is one of history's most abused cautionary tales, dragged out whenever someone needs a quick metaphor for irrational markets. The actual timeline tells a different story.
Tulip futures trading in the Dutch Republic operated as a genuine, functioning market for years before the famous crash. Rare tulip varieties, particularly Semper Augustus and Viceroy cultivars, commanded high prices because they were genuinely scarce and genuinely beautiful. Wealthy Dutch merchants treated them as luxury status goods, which they were. The speculative futures contracts that developed in 1636 extended trading to tavern-based informal markets, where buyers agreed to purchase bulbs still in the ground. The futures market drew in a new class of smaller traders who lacked the capital base of the original merchant speculators.
The actual mania period lasted only about six weeks. Prices peaked in early February 1637 and collapsed by the end of that same month. Six weeks. Frequently cited price charts showing years of runaway speculation compress and distort that timeline. At the peak, a single Semper Augustus bulb sold for approximately 6,000 guilders, roughly the cost of a fine Amsterdam canal house. That was genuinely unsustainable, and market participants knew it, which is why the exit was so fast.
When buyers at a Haarlem auction on February 3, 1637 failed to bid at expected prices, the market repriced immediately. No central committee met to manage the decline. No bailout followed. The Dutch government ultimately ruled that futures contracts signed after November 1636 could be voided for a small fee, around 3.5 percent of the contract value, which actually limited the legal carnage rather than extending it.
Recovery was not slow. The Dutch economy, already the most sophisticated in the world, absorbed the loss and continued expanding. The Dutch East India Company kept paying dividends. Amsterdam remained the center of global finance through the 1650s and well beyond. Farmers who held actual bulb stock took losses; leveraged speculators in informal tavern contracts took larger ones. The people who suffered most were the ones who speculated most aggressively with money they didn't have. The market sorted exactly the right people.
What you are left with is a six-week price spike in a single commodity, followed by a rapid, self-correcting market adjustment, in an economy that then dominated global trade for another generation. The "mania" narrative was largely built retrospectively in the 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions" by Charles Mackay, a Scottish journalist working two centuries later with limited primary sources. Economists Peter Garber and Earl Thompson examined the primary Dutch records and found the price movements far more rational than Mackay's account suggested.
Markets correct. Sometimes violently, always informatively. When left to sort itself out, only reckless participants got wrecked.
@DanielLDavis1@barnes_law Correct. We're Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul supporters and we thought Trump was going to end the stupid wars. Not start new ones.
@deaflibertarian Damn straight. Those who can not speak up when they know deep down they should are in psychological and spiritual bondage. They are stunted humans.
When something feels off, I speak up. I don't care how popular someone is, how cute the story sounds, or how many people believe it. My gut has become one of the most important things I listen to because life has taught me some very hard lessons.
Yesterday, someone asked me why I was “starting trouble” simply because I questioned something. They took me straight back to an old wound.
“Don't bother the doctor. She's the expert. She said everything's fine. Don't start trouble.” So I stayed quiet. I questioned myself. I convinced myself I was overreacting. As a result, my baby died. That is a pain I will carry for the rest of my life.
I have learned that speaking up is not the same as starting trouble. Asking questions is not disrespect. And someone else's title, popularity, or authority does not mean they are above being questioned.
I can be respectful and still ask questions. I can challenge a narrative without being labeled difficult. And I can trust myself enough to speak when something doesn't sit right with me.
You don't have to agree with me. You don't have to see things the way I do. But you will not make me feel guilty for using my voice.