@Catllc

“A wise woman wishes to be no one’s enemy; a wise woman refuses to be anyone’s victim”-M.A. Politically -😡 WTF?

[@Catllc @catllc]

In what sense are they prevented from living their life and having the same rights as anyone else? I never hear a satisfactory answer to this question.

From what I can ascertain, the only people expected to give up rights, are women. Our language and freedom to use accurate language to reflect our sex and our lives are under constant assault. It seems every time I read an article, some offensive euphemism is used to refer to us so as not to invalidate or offend a male. We are the only ones expected to “make way” in our sports, our prisons, our refuges, our intimate spaces, and to do so for the sex most likely to harm us. Crime rates bear this out. It is ridiculous to read an article about a “woman” accused of a rape that a male committed. It is the worst form of that overused word “gaslighting”.

I’m a woman. I live every day with both eyes wide open and wishing for eyes in the back of my head. I never feel completely safe. I don’t expect that I ever will. And while I don’t want anyone to be harmed or to feel othered or excluded from life, I will not compromise my safety or the safety of other women and young girls. I know male violence and strength and personally understand the disparity between males and females. This is not an esoteric discussion. Makeup, surgeries and cosmetics do not change this, or the patterns of male behavior.

The ruin of society? That sounds silly, but its force is a breaking of the civil compact, and it is far more pervasive and insidious in its reach than many naively assume. At the heart of this, is a lie. A lie that harms those who wreck their bodies in pursuit of something impossible, that harms every young and confused child who is no longer allowed to navigate the confusion of puberty and grow up without the forced infusion of “gender” and it’s now ubiquitous presence. A lie that has tried to wreck/cancel anyone’s life that has tried to provide ANY kind of counter to this “live” medical experiment on children as lab rats. A lie that expects unquestioned assent, under the fantasy of someone else’s god.

Acceptance in this matter should be the same that anyone with a belief system that differs from their fellow citizens enjoys. The right to it, and the expectation of not being discriminated against. We should all share that expectation. I want every one to live their best life, until their best life brings harm to others in its unique requirements in forcing down the boundaries and societal partitions that exist for indisputable reasons.

[Traces of Texas @TracesofTexas]

I'm embarrassed to admit that I just today learned that chiggers do not burrow into your body, causing that infernal itch. Rather, the intense itching from a chigger bite is primarily caused by your body's immune reaction to digestive enzymes in the chigger's saliva.

Chiggers are the tiny larval stage of certain mites. They don't burrow into your skin or suck blood ---- which I'd have bet a thousand dollars that they do. Instead, they attach to the skin (often in areas where clothing is tight) using mouthparts. Then they inject saliva containing proteolytic (digestive) enzymes that liquefy nearby skin cells, creating a feeding tube called a stylostome. They feed on the dissolved tissue for a few days before dropping off. Neat,huh?

It's the enzymes and the stylostome that remain in the skin even after the chigger leaves, triggering the reaction, because your immune system detects the foreign enzymes and saliva proteins as invaders. This leads to Inflammation and release of histamine (and other chemicals), which causes the itching, redness etc...

All I know is that I hate them with the white-hot intensity of 10,000 suns.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@TracesofTexas I never understood how something so small could cause such devastation. When I was a teenager we went on a 5 day camping trip somewhere in east Texas. I came back covered from head to toe and felt sick for a week in addition to the loss of several dermal layers.

[@Catllc @catllc]

When I was about 6 I was attacked by red wasp (I hate them!!) that at the time looked the size of a small bird. I ran screaming and flapping my arms about, and my grandmother chased me down with a bottle of bleach, brushed the wasp off of me and rubbed bleach into the bite. It stopped the fire within minutes. It was pretty amazing. I wish I had known about that for chiggers too.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@babybeginner It is exciting! My grandmother had a pomegranate tree. I always loved them and never stopped thinking about her tree. She is gone, but I wanted to plant it for both of us.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

135 British MPs are fighting guidance that would deny ‘Paula’ the right to enter women’s and girls’ changing rooms.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@karentraviss @SamaHoole Very interesting. Thank you!

[@Catllc @catllc]

@floridiot42 @giveashitnature Thank you!

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

You can walk into a garden center, buy a praying mantis egg case off the shelf, and set a hummingbird trap in your own backyard without ever knowing it.

The egg cases sold as natural pest control are almost always Chinese mantis, sometimes European mantis. Both were brought to the US over a century ago, the Chinese one by accident on a shipment of plants in 1896, and both have spread everywhere since. They get marketed as an organic way to handle pests. The pitch hides a few ugly details.

A Chinese mantis grows to four or five inches, more than twice the size of our native Carolina mantis. It's an ambush predator that sits on a flower and grabs whatever lands, which means it eats the exact things you planted the flower to attract. Bumblebees. Butterflies, monarchs included. At one wildlife garden in Brooklyn, staff kept finding little piles of discarded monarch wings under the mantises' favorite perches.

It gets worse. These things are big enough to take a hummingbird. Scientists have documented well over a hundred cases of mantises catching and killing small birds, most of them hummingbirds, snatched right at flowers and feeders. The big imported mantis will also hunt down and eat the smaller native Carolina mantis, so buying one actively shoves out the local species.

So if you want the pest control, plant for it instead. A yard full of native flowers pulls in the wasps, birds, and native mantis that handle pests without ambushing your hummingbirds.

And if you find a fat, beige, ping-pong-ball-sized egg case on a twig this winter, that's the imported one. You're allowed to clip it.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@DiscreetOrElse @babybeginner That description is too perfect! 😂

[🎩Laird of the Manor🎩 @LairdOfThManor]

A small public service announcement from the Department of Things That You Should Know…

It has not “peeked” your interest.
Nor has it “peaked” your interest.

…It has piqued your interest.

You are not “phased” by something.
You are fazed by it.

If you’ve had a long day, you are weary.
If you suspect someone is an idiot, you are wary.

It is “due course”, not “do course”.
“Per se”, not “per say”.

And while we’re here, it’s “could have”, not “could of”, but that particular battle may already be lost.

Thank you for your attention during this brief outbreak of grammatical housekeeping.

This has been a @LairdofthManor announcement.🎩💙

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Dartmoor's hill ponies have grazed those commons for longer than there has been a country called England. Fewer than a thousand are left, down from six thousand a generation ago. The United Nations listed them as endangered in 2023. So, naturally, the body charged with protecting nature has decided to get rid of nine in ten of the survivors.

There is a process, obviously.

Natural England's new grazing contracts now count the ponies in the same bucket as the cattle and sheep. A commoner with a fixed quota has a choice: keep a semi-wild pony worth nothing at market, or use the slot for a lamb he can sell. Guess which one survives the spreadsheet. The rest are gathered in the autumn drifts, and with nowhere to put thousands of unhandled moorland ponies, the next stop is the abattoir.

Natural England would like it noted that it has not ordered a cull. It has merely built a machine whose only output is a cull, switched it on, and handed the bolt gun to a farmer so the fingerprints land elsewhere. Very tidy.

And now the funny part. The pony is the best tool on the entire moor for eating Molinia, the coarse purple grass strangling Dartmoor into a brown monoculture. Cattle and sheep won't touch it. The ponies hoover it down and clear the ground for the orchids, the wildflowers and the insects behind them. Remove the ponies and the moor chokes into precisely the lifeless scrubland the contract was meant to prevent.

So the conservation strategy, in full: protect the habitat by deleting the animal that maintains the habitat. A masterclass.

Better still, Natural England's own Fursdon review looked at this exact question and told them, in plain English, not to lump ponies in with cattle and not to cut pony numbers. They read it, praised it, said they fully supported it, then did the precise opposite.

Four thousand years these animals have run Dartmoor with no committee and no contract. They could be gone within one, and the people who did it will write it up as a win for nature.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@lexx_frost @giveashitnature Priorities, eh? Have to control those dang freeloading butterflies.

[Just Andy 🇺🇸🏴‍☠️🌵☀️ @andreaheart19]

@USDA Here's what she's not telling you, folks. That gentleman in the video is part of the very powerful lobby that’s telling @SecRollins what to do. She wants to be Texas governor, And they've promised to back her. She's manipulating your beef prices.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@lexx_frost @giveashitnature What the hell? Can we sue on behalf of the butterflies? Ignorance with rigidity is so frustrating to encounter.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@SirBacon_the2nd @japan_nobunaga Well put. Unfortunately. I’m losing a lot of my interest in college sports. I used to love watching the young players improve and grow. Now, there may only be a handful that stick around.

[@Catllc @catllc]

@mearlyalter1 @AJamesMcCarthy He’s beautiful. I see that he really loves that chair!

[@Catllc @catllc]

@robbieann4 @AJamesMcCarthy That’s a wonderful thought!

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

Everyone has been so impressed by Japanese fans cleaning up after themselves but most probably missed this beautiful moment at the post-game (🇳🇱2 - 2🇯🇵) press conference.

Toward the end after reporters were done asking questions, 🇯🇵head coach, Hajime Moriyasu, asked to speak one more time.

🗣️ “May I speak?”

He turned to the Dutch reporters in the room.

🗣️ “I think there are many Dutch reporters here as well, so I’d like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the people of the Netherlands once again.”

Moriyasu explained that when he became part of the Japan national team, Japanese football still had no professional league.

🗣️ “I was trained by a Dutch coach named Hans Ooft. It wasn’t just me. Japanese coaches in general were greatly influenced by him, which has led to the development of Japanese soccer today.”

He also mentioned another Dutch figure who shaped his career.

🗣️ “The legendary Dutch coach Wim Jansen served as the manager for J.League’s Sanfrecce Hiroshima and also as a coach for Urawa Reds, contributing to Japanese soccer.”

🗣️ “It’s not just those two. Many other coaches and players have contributed to raising the level of Japanese soccer, so I want to express my thanks. Thank you very much.”

What a masterclass in graciousness and gratitude. Imagine after a high-stakes match, instead of basking in glory and bravado (well-deserved in my opinion), the coach took to the microphone to... thank his opponents publicly and sincerely.

Japan's cultural operating system prizes harmony (wa), respect for precedent, and gratitude as a form of strength, not weakness. Japanese sports culture reflects its broader society where you'll see athletes bow to their opponents, thanking referees, and even crediting rivals or mentors.

Think of sumo wrestlers, Olympic athletes, or even bullet-train staff apologizing for a 30-second delay.

The Japanese have this concept of On (恩) - it is the sense of indebtedness to those who came before or helped you. It's what you'd expect from a culture that truly prizes continuity.

Moriyasu was acknowledging a real debt to Dutch coaches like Hans Ooft (who coached Japan in the early 90s and helped professionalize the game) and Wim Jansen. Japanese football openly credits foreign influences - Dutch "Total Football" philosophy, German organization, Brazilian flair - while building something distinctly their own. Few nations do this with such little ego.

Japan is pure class

[Janet Murray @jan_murray]

This @barrydistrict story is an embarrassment to journalism.

Readers are told a "woman" masturbated in front of nurses. They are then told the prosecutor said:

"The defendant put her hands down her leggings to the groin area. Staff could see that she had her penis in her hand and that her hand was moving up and down."

"Her penis."

To be fair to the reporter, he is accurately reporting what was said in court.

But that means the pronouns change from female to male halfway through the story.

And journalism is supposed to help readers understand what happened by reporting material facts clearly and accurately.

Not require them to perform mental gymnastics in order to make sense of the story.

This kind of reporting is confusing, absurd and frankly beneath the standards journalism should aspire to.

And it shows exactly what happens when gender ideology is allowed to dictate public life - including the legal system and the media.

Link in comments 👇