Dallis Basel

Rancher, big crop is grass, harvested with cattle and sheep

[Dallis Basel @dallis22]

Looking at the drought monitor yesterday, we are in moderate drought. We have a mesonet site in our north pasture. Yesterday it said 99 with 7% humidity. Yearly moisture is 5.98”. A deficit of 6.85”. No water, no grass, no hay. What does it take to be in severe drought.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧On a winter night in 1844, the whole street laughed at a shop with 5 things for sale.

Today 1 in 8 people on Earth belongs to what it started.

Rochdale, Lancashire, deep in the Hungry Forties. The cotton mills ran day and night and the weavers still went hungry. That year they had struck for better pay and lost. Most of them had no vote.

Even the food they could afford cheated them. Chalk in the flour. Sand in the sugar. A thumb on the scales. 🔥

They could not raise their pay. They could not cast a ballot. But no law stopped them keeping a shop.

So 28 of them, weavers and tradesmen, put their names to a list and called themselves the Equitable Pioneers. The stake was £1 a member, weeks of wages, saved in pennies through the hungry months until they had about £28 between them. Enough for the ground floor of a worn old warehouse. 31 Toad Lane.

Before they opened, a warper named Charles Howarth wrote them rules. ✍️ One member, one vote. A woman's membership equal to a man's. Full weight and honest measure. Only the purest food they could buy. And the one rule nobody had made work before: the dividend. Profits back to the shoppers, in proportion to what they spent. The customer became the owner.

They opened at 8pm on 21 December 1844, 4 days before Christmas, lit by their own candles because the gas company had refused them. The lads jeered through the window. The Pioneers weighed out their butter anyway. Full weight.

It held. A year on: 74 members, £710 through the till. In 1846 a weaver named Eliza Brierley paid in her own £1, and her vote counted the same as any man's. Parliament took another 82 years to match it.

Town after town copied the rulebook, then country after country. Today around 3 million co-operatives run on rules that began in that shop. Around 1 billion members. 1 person in every 8 alive. 🏛️

And the little shop still stands. 31 Toad Lane is a museum now.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

1 billion members, and hardly a soul who can name 1 of the 28.

They asked for honest weight. We owe them honest memory.

We are the home of British heroes.
There is a place for you in it.

👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧
Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[South Dakota Standard @DakotaStandard]

“There are times politicians should return to the private sector. Dusty, this is the right time for you to do just that.” — Frank Kloucek
https://t.co/TrIP4YpFUh

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

As your next Senator, I’ll work for South Dakotans, not special interests.

The American Dream is out of reach for too many people, and it’s time Washington supports policies that reward hard work.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Farm Action @FarmActionUS]

Farmer Mike Callicrate just declared: “We need to break up” Big Agriculture.

“Walmart should not own a meatpacking plant.”

And Farm Action’s Joe Maxwell broke down how corporate concentration has created a lose-lose situation for farmers and consumers, while corporations pocket massive profits:

“Three or four of them control the marketplace.”

“They’re no longer competing.”

“They’re just simply gouging the consumer and lowering the price [paid to] the farmer and putting all that money in their pockets.”

@MikeCallicrate @CivilEats

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

If you want a Senator whose answer to your question of: “Why is now the right time to go to war with Iran”?

ISN’T: “I don’t know if there’s ever a right time”

Then send me to Washington and I’ll give South Dakotans real answers instead of shoulder shrugs when I’m asked the tough questions.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

🚨🚨 $5.6 BILLION of your tax dollars spent on bombs and missiles alone in just 48 hours in another war in the Middle East.

Meanwhile back at home, Washington leaves us begging for funding for rural hospitals, enough teachers for our schools, and a reliable energy grid.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

One weeks difference in Hot Springs. Thanks, @RoundsforSenate.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

Some excerpts from an article in today’s New York Times:

“Overall, the top 1 percent now control $55.8 trillion in assets — more than the G.D.P. of the United States and China combined.”

. . . . . .

“The private equity behemoth Blackstone, for instance, saw its effective tax rate drop from 18 percent in 2017 to 7 percent in 2018 to -1.3 percent in 2019. Over the same period, Bloomberg estimated that chief executive Stephen Schwarzman, whose personal fortune is largely reflective of his ownership stake in the firm, saw his net worth grow to about $19 billion in 2019 from around $11 billion in 2017. He is now worth an estimated $45 billion, a more than 300 percent increase in eight years.”

. . . . . .

“Federal Reserve data shows that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans now own about $25.6 trillion worth of stocks and mutual funds, the same amount as the remaining 99 percent of the country. About half the stock owned by the wealthiest Americans — $13.7 trillion worth — is owned by the richest 0.1 percent.”

. . . . . .

“The Walton family, which controls Walmart, currently has an estimated combined wealth of $550 billion, up from $256 billion in the spring of 2020.”

__________________

It’s America’s “Golden Age” indeed if you’re among the top 1 percent who continue to amass more and more gold. It’s hard to wrap your head around the fact that the wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans exceeds the GDP of the United States and China … combined.

On the other side of the tracks, ordinary Americans get fed a steady diet of empty rhetoric about how our elected officials are working hard for the working class as data prove that in reality it’s the rich who just keep on getting richer at the expense of the rest.

And life is really sweet if you’re among the 900 billionaires who are in the top 0.1 percent. Remember Pam Bondi saying we shouldn’t be talking about Jeffrey Epstein, we should be talking about the stock market going over 50,000? Well, the top 1 percent own 99 percent of all stocks, and the top 0.1 percent own half of that!

And to bring it back home, the two congressional candidates the party elites in Washington chose for voters in Western North Carolina — Chuck Edwards and Jamie Ager — are CEOs of multimillion dollar corporations and both are top 1 percent rich.

And both party-picked candidates are bankrolled by top 0.1 percent billionaires.

Stephen Schwarzman (net worth $45 billion), CEO of Blackstone Group (and pal of Jeffrey Epstein), is a max donor to Chuck Edwards. Schwarzman and his wife combined have given $14,000 directly to Chuck’s campaign.

I noted yesterday that Jamie Ager’s biggest donor is the Welcome PAC (10 donations totaling $36,500), and the second biggest donor to the Welcome PAC is Epstein pal Reid Hoffman (net worth $3 billion), co-founder of LinkedIn. Well, the biggest donor to the Welcome PAC is Rob Walton (net worth $146 billion), the eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton.

And that’s how America’s ruling class works: the top 0.1 percent bankroll (since they’re too busy making money to run for office) the top 1 percent to hoodwink the bottom 99 percent to continue screwing themselves.

It’s not a Golden Age for the working class, it’s a Golden Shower. Maybe one day they’ll wise up and turn it off.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

Trump now says we have the lowest prescription drug prices in the world thanks to him.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

Mike Rounds claims he’s running a “grassroots” campaign, so why is he cashing checks from finance & tech PACs while families struggle with rising costs? Voters should ask themselves who he’s really working for — South Dakotans or the corporations funding his campaigns.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

Mike Rounds has taken millions from Wall Street, Big Tech, and corporate PACs, so it’s no surprise he votes like it. I don’t take corporate PAC money, and when I’m Senator I’ll put South Dakota ahead of special interests.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

Mike Rounds didn’t wake up disconnected from South Dakota. He’s spent years in Washington listening to his corporate donors and enriching himself on the taxpayer dime. Support my campaign for a voice South Dakotans can trust.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

While it's still Native Americans' Day, I also wanted to share this:
The 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre was just that: a massacre. Attempting to overwrite it as a "battle" as the DoD did last month is ahistorical and disrespectful to South Dakotans.

[Dallis Basel @dallis22]

@JimEspy I take pictures of serial numbers on tractors and equipment. And store them in a folder

[Mike Henriksen (First Person: Legendary SD Sports) @MikeHenriksen]

Congratulations, @RepDustyJohnson! Today you were able to take food out of the mouths of starving refugee kids, and still managed to shoot Bert & Ernie! All to save 1/10th of 1 percent of the total USA budget. As the old saying goes, little man, you've had a busy day.

[Brian Bengs @BrianBengs]

As a retired Air Force JAG, I know that basic governmental integrity requires unimpeachable ethical standards & irreproachable personal conduct by all people in government.

Honesty is an indispensable requirement of public service & we must consistently root out corruption.