W. Dayton King

Writer, secular, physical therapist. Liberal and a bit of a redneck. I love animals, art, and hiking.

[W. Dayton King @WDaytonKing]

Remember, folks: emotional and verbal abuse don’t leave visible marks, but they’re still abuse. If your partner or family member is mean to you cut them out of your life.

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

Rep. Massie calls out the JD Vance Epstein files lies 🤥

[Dan McClellan @maklelan]

There is no religious discrimination taking place here, there are just bigots with a persecution complex trying to gin up something to whine about. Players weren't required to wear these uniforms & have always known they are prohibited from putting messaging on their uniforms.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

In the late 1920s, one male heath hen returned to the same patch of ground where his kind had gathered for generations to find mates. But there was no mate. He was alone.

The heath hen was a plump, ground-dwelling bird, a relative of the prairie chicken, and it once ranged along the East Coast from southern New England to Virginia. In colonial times it was so abundant that people treated it as ordinary food. Nobody imagined it could disappear.

Then we hunted it hard and converted much of its scrubby grassland habitat to farms. By around 1870, the species had vanished from the mainland. A few hundred birds survived on Martha's Vineyard.

People tried to save them. A preserve was established. Then a fire swept through it in 1916, destroying much of the habitat. Hawks preyed heavily on the exposed survivors, disease struck, and a dwindling population with little genetic diversity spiraled downward.

By 1928, one bird remained: a male locals called Booming Ben.

Male heath hens gathered each spring on traditional dancing grounds called leks, inflating orange air sacs on their necks and producing deep booming calls to attract females. Observers reported that Ben continued to perform these displays, calling across fields where no females remained.

He was last seen on March 11, 1932.

Today a small bronze statue stands on Martha's Vineyard in his memory: a single bird, frozen mid-display, still calling across a field that, at last and for good, has no one left to answer.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

You can pick up a baby bird and put it back in the nest. The parents won't smell your hands and abandon it. Songbirds barely smell anything, and that old "the mother will reject it" line is one of the most worst wildlife myths going.

If you find a naked or barely feathered chick on the ground, it fell early and needs to go back. Find the nest, set it back in, walk away. The parents will come back.

Call a licensed wildlife rehabber if you can't find the nest, the bird's bleeding or cold, or a cat got it. Don't feed it yourself. Find one through your state wildlife agency.

If it's fully feathered and hopping around, that's a fledgling, and it's supposed to be there. Mom and dad are watching from a branch and feeding it on a schedule. You can leave it be.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

A bobcat eats hundreds of rats and mice a year, for free, and doesn't bill us for its service.

It won't bother you, either. It's about twice the size of a housecat, wants nothing to do with people, and you'll be lucky to ever lay eyes on one. What it wants is the mice in your yard, that's it.

But here's the sick part: in the mountains around Los Angeles, 88% of bobcats tested positive for rat poison. In one study, 31 of 39 dead bobcats had it in their bodies. They eat poisoned rodents, the anticoagulant tears down their immune system, mange takes hold, and they die slow.

We put poison out to kill rats, and the poison kills the bobcat.

If one turns up in your yard, you don't have a problem. You have the best pest control on the continent, on the house. Put the rodenticide away and let the bobcats cook.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Back in Victorian days, it was considered quite fancy for gardeners to build something they called a stumpery.

It's a pile of dead stumps and logs, often stacked roots-up, arranged in a shady damp corner and left to rot on purpose. The Victorians built them to show off ferns, but they also turn out to be some of the best wildlife habitat you can make.

The first one went up in 1856 at Biddulph Grange in England, where a gardener took the stumps left from clearing land and stacked them ten feet high along a sunken path. The fern craze was at its peak, and the rotting wood made perfect planting pockets. King Charles has a famous modern stumpery at Highgrove built from sweet chestnut roots.

What the Victorians treated as decoration, nature treated as a feast. As the wood breaks down it feeds fungi, mosses, and beetles, including stag beetles whose grubs live in deadwood for years. Toads, salamanders, and small mammals move into the damp gaps. A single rotting log can support an astonishing variety of life.

To build one: find a shaded corner, stack stumps and logs with the roots facing up and out, leave plenty of gaps, and tuck ferns and moss around the base. Then walk away and let it rot.

You make a sculpture out of dead trees, and everything in the yard moves in.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The best mosquito repellent for your patio costs $20 and runs on a wall outlet: a fan.

Mosquitoes are terrible fliers with a top speed of about 1-2 miles an hour, slower than you walk, and they struggle to make headway against even a gentle breeze. Point an oscillating fan at your outdoor seating area and they'll physically struggle to get to you.

It works on two levels too. A mosquito finds you by following the plume of carbon dioxide you exhale, plus the heat and scent rising off your skin. A fan scatters all of it and erases the trail that leads them in. So it knocks them out of the air and helps hide you from their senses at the same time.

This isn't folk wisdom. The CDC notes that fans reduce mosquito landings, and studies have found that using a fan can substantially reduce mosquito bites.

Citronella candles offer only modest protection and are generally much less effective than a fan or EPA-registered repellents. Plug in a fan, aim it at the table, and take your evening back.

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

If NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has time to attend a $1 million-a-head dinner at Mar-a-Lago and meet with President Xi in China, he should be able to find time to answer questions from Congress.

The American people deserve answers.

[g. @GeauxGabrielle]

The United States arrests 60,000 pregnant women a year. The most you get in my state is an extra sandwich at lunch and dinner. Adult women’s prisons are subject to MUCH MORE oversight than the juvenile system which is NOT centralized and is a total free for all.

Immigration detention is the same. They move these girls around in transfers to keep them from their right to seek an abortion to conceal the rapes.

The FBI had to raid and shutdown a prison to get the rapes to stop. That is our justice system in America.

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: In Chicago, ICE agents were caught on video assaulting a local chaplain for filming, and asking questions, about what was happening on her own street… AFTER the arrest was already made.

In the video, Alley Henny, a Black chaplain, is standing with her back against a parked car while recording.

An ICE agent is already pushing her backward as she simply asks:

“What did he do?”

But here’s what makes this situation even more disturbing…

The man had already been detained… He was already INSIDE the ICE vehicle.

The arrest was over.

That means, there was no active arrest taking place for her to “interfere with.”

Yet, multiple agents surrounded her anyway.

One agent yells, “Get back! We have a warrant for his arrest. Get out of here.”

She responds, “This is my neighborhood.”

The agent’s response?

“I don’t care.”

Then, while she’s already backed against a car, and surrounded by TWO agents… a THIRD agent rushes over, grabs her, and forcefully shoves her down the street while screaming, “GET BACK! I ALREADY TOLD YOU ONCE!”

And just to be clear…

She wasn’t stopping an arrest.
She wasn’t obstructing agents from reaching a suspect.
She wasn’t preventing agents from taking someone into custody.

The suspect was ALREADY IN THE VEHICLE.

So, this entire situation raises serious concerns about excessive force and retaliation against protected speech.

Because once the situation is already controlled, there’s no reason for that level of force against someone who’s just recording and asking questions.

And if that kind of response isn’t checked, and held accountable, it starts to send a very dangerous message…

That recording and questioning government actions can be met with physical violence, and intimidation.

And that’s exactly what the constitution is meant to prevent.

[Epstein File Search @epsteinsearchin]

In February, Rep. Thomas Massie read Attorney General Pam Bondi a line from the Epstein files.

Leslie Wexner, he said, is listed in them as a co-conspirator. Not to tax evasion. To child sex trafficking.

Nobody has been charged.

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

Trump's National Guard surge violently detains U.S. citizen—for holding a sign.

She was standing on her own front porch.

3 soldiers block her from entering her home—tackle her to ground.

"Help! Help! You're breaking my arm!"
she cries.

"You came onto my property—you have no authority to detain me!"

Trump Administration announced a "surge" in the number of National Guard and ICE agents in DC to at least 5,000 last month.

On at least three additional occasions in the last two weeks, National Guard soldiers have handcuffed and detained people in DC.

This footage was submitted to FilmThePoliceDC on June 2.

Incident occurred in the Truxton Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

Here are the top 5 dogs of the week!

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

COPS ARREST A MAN FOR ORGANIZING A PROTEST AGAINST A DATA CENTER:

Video shows Illinois police arresting Harley Delander for organizing a protest against a data center in his town.

He explains to police that he did nothing wrong and they’re violating his First Amendment rights.

The police don’t care and arrest him anyway. This is the current state of America.

Our government and both parties are completely owned by the tech billionaires who are rewiring our entire economy to usher in their AI techno-capitalist dystopia.

This is why you are seeing the government do whatever it can to silence any and all opposition to the dystopian nightmare their tech billionaire owners are pushing onto us.

From labeling anti-data center protesters “extremists” to now arresting people for planning protests, the US government is actively attacking and jailing its own people to protect the Tech oligarchs it serves.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff: This war in Iran is the worst foreign policy blunder since Iraq. And just like the Iraq War, it's a war built on lies. Let’s update the record:

On day one, the president said it was running ahead of schedule. On day 10, he said it was very complete . Day 21, getting very close . Day 32, leaving very soon . On day 39, the President of the United States said a whole civilization will die…

And on the next day, day 40, he declared total and complete victory . Day 67, great progress. Day 79, the clock is ticking. Today is day 92 . And on day 92 Iran's ballistic missiles and drones have not been destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz, which was opened before the war is still closed. The regime is intact along with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium—a stockpile Iran only built after President Trump shredded President Obama's Iran deal

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

Here are the top 5 dogs of May!

[derek guy @dieworkwear]

Happy Pride Month. If you're a gay man, please remember your power. People often think that gay men are innately fashionable, which means if you wear some stupid shit for long enough, straight people, including homophobes, will copy you and then you can laugh at them.

[WeRateDogs @dog_rates]

Here are the top 5 dogs of the week!