General Dogsbody

Retired lawyer now looking after abused animals. Wide awake.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The most toxic medicine of the 1800s caused patients' teeth to fall out and jawbones to rot.

When the US Surgeon General tried to ban it, furious doctors had him court-martialed.

This drug was not a fringe snake oil sold by traveling hucksters, but the standard of care prescribed by the world's most respected physicians: mercury(I) chloride, universally known as calomel.

During the early to mid-1800s, mainstream medicine was dominated by the concept of "heroic medicine."

Doctors believed that illness was caused by an imbalance of the body's natural humors and that patients needed to be violently purged of fluids to expel the disease.

Calomel was the ultimate tool for this job. It was prescribed for almost every conceivable ailment, from yellow fever and syphilis to simple colds and infant teething.

As a powerful purgative and laxative, calomel emptied the digestive tract, convincing doctors that the medicine was doing its job.

Because it was a heavy metal compound, it accumulated in the body. Patients treated with calomel routinely developed severe mercury poisoning.

The immediate symptoms included uncontrollable salivation—sometimes producing several pints of saliva a day—along with swollen gums, loose teeth, and metallic breath.

Prolonged use or high doses led to catastrophic structural damage.

The mercury destroyed soft tissue and facial bone, leaving patients permanently disfigured or dead.

Despite this, it was ubiquitous. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark carried a concentrated calomel compound called Dr. Rush's Bilious Pills (nicknamed "Thunderclappers" for their explosive laxative effect) across the continent, and thousands of Civil War soldiers were poisoned by military surgeons who issued the powder for dysentery.

When Surgeon General William A. Hammond struck calomel from the US Army's standard supply table in 1863, he argued the drug was causing vastly more harm than the diseases it was supposed to treat.

The medical establishment was so outraged by this restriction on their favorite treatment that they orchestrated his court-martial and removal from office.

Calomel's widespread use only truly ended decades later, when the germ theory of disease finally convinced the medical community that systematically poisoning patients was not a path to health.

[Annunziata Rees-Mogg @zatzi]

Labour hates the countryside.

Labour hates farming.

Labour hates traditional Britain.

A nation built on wool. And no one to shear it.

No understanding that it is a purely seasonal, but highly skilled, job.

Labour doesn’t ban thousands of unskilled* permanent migrants.

But 75 sheep shearers who arrive, work and then leave every year.

According to Labour they are the problem.

It’s Labour that’s the problem.

* over 140,000 organisations across the UK hold active sponsor licences. Among them are hundreds of high-street and convenience operations, including:
•Corner shops, mini-markets, and newsagents
•Barbers and hair salons
•Kebab, pizza, and fast-food takeaways
•Vape shops and small local restaurants

[Moorland Association @MoorlandAssoc]

Courtesy of the Yorkshire Dales Moorland Group:

With an estimated 350,000 people currently evacuated in France and Spain because of wildfires, and the disastrous wildfires currently burning across parts of the UK you'd think the message about landscape scale fires would be sinking in.

A few days ago a car being driven by joyriders was abandoned and presumably torched at a remote moorland site here in the Yorkshire Dales.

Immediately our network of gamekeepers were heading to the scene with specialised kit and their intimate knowledge of the area. Assisted by resident farmers and the local fire brigade over a dozen keepers had the fire out within minutes.

A key reason was because the surrounding vegetation on this managed moor had been broken up with controlled burns and cut breaks.

One of the fire crew members was heard saying that the low vegetation fuel loads and heather management had been crucial to preventing a catastrophe.

This is why the moorland group is yelling at policy makers to listen to people on the ground and heed the advice and generational knowledge of those who live and work on the moors.

Thank goodness the keepers were on hand to save another important moorland landscape.

[Moorland Association @MoorlandAssoc]

Burn old, woody heather in spring, and by summer the new growth comes back four times richer in nitrogen and three times richer in phosphorus. Researchers have measured it.

As heather ages it locks the moor's scarce nutrients into tough stems, the soil grows poorer, and the tender shoots that hill sheep and red grouse depend on start to disappear. Leave it be, and pollution-fed grasses move in and the purple moor goes to rank grassland.

A controlled burn resets it. The fire returns those trapped nutrients to the ground as ash, and the fresh heather draws them straight back up, greener and better able to hold out through drought and winter.

The fear that fire wrecks the ground? The same study looked into it. The topsoil's organic matter came through intact, and the soil kept the deep acidity heather needs.

This is the work gamekeepers and hill farmers have done for generations, one careful patch at a time. Now there are numbers behind it.

Read more — link in replies:

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

@SgilliesScott @SamaHoole If you're in the UK most large Tesco stores stock Delamere Goat's Butter...in my trolley every week.

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

@clim8resistance @timothy_stanley Mr Vince is totally captured by ideology - he ignores that which is inconvenient; no doubt he is salivating at the prospect of future laws encompassing “False and Misleading Information: An Evidence Summary and Map for Policy and Practice”:
https://t.co/yCJv55QqZa

[Sonia Elijah @sonia_elijah]

🚨 The UK Government dropped a 136-page “evidence review” that reads like a dystopian instruction manual for controlling speech. They want to treat questions about biological males in women’s sports, migrant crime stats, election integrity, and vaccine scepticism as “false and misleading information” that causes “harm.” The same people who pushed lockdowns and behavioural controls during COVID are now recommending “prebunking,” psychological inoculation, and new statutory frameworks to police narratives. And the report leans on groups like the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), the same outfit with deep Labour ties that once exaggerated “anti-vax” reach by 1,300x and openly campaigned to “Kill Musk’s Twitter.” This isn’t about fighting lies. It’s about enforcing orthodoxy. When the state decides which observations about biology, migration, and public health are “harmful,” free speech dies and distrust explodes.
✍️Full investigation here 👇
https://t.co/HAS2rpgHSn

[Ethical Skeptic ☀ @EthicalSkeptic]

The Utter Elegance of ECDO Theory

If only the crust displaces, where do we derive the anisotropy necessary to substantiate the 175 sudden cataclysm traditions? The crust, oceans, polar ice, etc., are not even 1% of the way to sufficiency in this regard.

And if the Earth's architecture involves one integral object with no decoupling potential, how would we ever observe two rotational states to begin with, as the monuments so clearly demonstrate?

The geophysical answer is constrained to somewhere between those bookends, and only the core-mantle boundary contains all five geophysical factors necessary for a decoupling.

This decoupling mechanism must also explain, and function in concert with, rapid climate change.

Thus one can perceive the utter elegance of ECDO Theory. It resolves every current geophysical, cultural, and climate challenge at an optimal logical saddle point.

[AnUnimportantPerson @TheUn_important]

@JamesEsses Yes, keep my piece fiction, thank you. https://t.co/7L4jPwLpuy

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.

The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.

Understand what is walking out.

Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.

The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.

Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.

Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.

Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.

Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

[Help2Rehome Scotland @H2RScotland]

Nala is looking for a new loving forever home.
Nala is a healthy beautiful 18 month old Domestic short hair, black outdoor cat.
Once Nala learns to trust you she totally loves her human people, she is calm, adorable and has a very affectionate nature.
She will probably take about a week to settle in to her new home. She will initially hiss, appear a little timid and will hide, however once you gain her trust she is an easy cat to love and care for.
Nala will need a new home as an independent cat.
She is not tolerant of other cats.
Nala once settled is fine with children and dogs, she can be left on her own, she generally just sleeps, mostly on a living room chair.
Nala appears calm in the car, the occasional times its been required.
She will need a large carrier for transporting, otherwise she will become stressed.
Nala is registered with the vet, no health problems and has been spayed.
Nala only eats dry food, currently on Harringtons, likes Dreamies and uses wood pellet cat litter.
If you are interested in giving this beautiful wee girl a new home please email [email protected] for more information.

If you need help to rehome please call 0330 133 4594.

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

Disgusting promotion. Best thing about this is the number and content of responses

[Melissa 🐭 @missyTHX1138]

Here is what they do with the research money they get besides blow it on claiming cough medicine or BS Cognitive behavior therapy will help treat symptoms. I have never seen a legitimate patient be able to move like this. Even those of us injured by, drugs, and different viral persistences can’t. I sure as heck can’t. I move like a stiff plank of wood or not at all. This is the biggest farce ever. It’s offensive.
In the comments they try to explain it away and the patients are not buying it. They used to be called CFIDS Association of America and got caught blowing money on weird things. They can try to change their name and re-invent themselves all they want, but it doesn’t hide that they are frauds who go with whatever bullshit narrative the government tells them to. Meanwhile zero patients have been truly helped.

[General Dogsbody @GeneralDogsbod3]

@ValerieAnne1970 A thought provoking article on what happened in Samoa in 2019 with measles:
https://t.co/pQ6EWYUKVb

[Valerie Anne Smith @ValerieAnne1970]

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny: "Don’t fall for the fear campaign... what is MEASLES?... a fever, a cough, a rash, runny eyes & runny nose."

"The measles vaccine came out in 1963. In 1962, the death rate from measles was two in a million.”

"So it was not even deadly BEFORE we had a vaccine."

IF YOU FEAR MEASLES...

You must not know that even in the 60s, before the vaccine, the survival rate was over 99.9%.

You must not know that the MMR is a live virus vaccine & can cause measles.

You must not know that MMR and MMRV vaccines have been linked to 2,657% MORE DEATHS than measles itself since 1995.

You must not know that it's a very mild childhood illness for well-nourished children.

You must not know that natural measles infection provides lifelong immunity, unlike the vaccine.

You must not know that there are huge lifelong health benefits to getting measles, including a lower risk of cancer, heart disease & stronger immune resilience.

You must not know that the MMR insert lists over 60 serious adverse events, ranging from encephalitis, seizures & death.

You must not know that studies show Vitamin A drastically reduces measles complications-yet public health officials ignore it.

[TWS @tws_pk2]

Since last night some have been very kind and some not so much. We have been criticised for asking a popular account for help. Please note we are not asking for money but exposure. You see we always help smaller organisations in Pakistan when they are struggling and it's never done us any harm. You have to understand that the dogs of Pakistan are being massacred and there is nobody outside of Pakistan speaking up for them. But for those who have objected please don't worry, we will not ever ask any popular account for help ever again. We will continue to be the voice for these dogs and we know our loyal supporters will be by our side. Meanwhile whilst those who have taken offence at us for requesting help just remember that whilst we write this post more dogs will have lost their lives. RIP innocents, we are sorry we failed you 😢💔

[ETHICAL APPROACH UK @EthicalApproach]

A single entry in the Metropolitan Police CRN 6029679/21 SAR continues to trouble me.

The allegation was ultimately classified as a "Victimless allegation".

By that stage however, the Metropolitan Police had already been provided with statements from individuals alleging death, serious injury and other harm arising from the matters reported. Indeed, the police record itself acknowledges that the complainants attended Hammersmith Police Station with a large quantity of documentary evidence.

A simple constitutional question therefore arises.

How does an allegation supported by victim statements become classified as a "victimless allegation"?

Were those statements examined?

If they were, why were those individuals not regarded as victims for the purposes of the assessment?

If they were not, on what evidential basis was the classification made?

These questions go to the integrity of the criminal justice process itself.

How can an allegation be recorded as "victimless" when victim evidence had already been placed before the police?

This is a matter arising from the Metropolitan Police's own documentary record.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The obvious answer to losing our foreign shearers is to simply train our own. Britain already does. Training was never the problem, and here is what actually is.

The country has fourteen million breeding ewes and about three months to shear them, because the fleece has to come off in a short warm window or the animal suffers. A mountain of work crammed into one season, then nothing for nine months.

So think like someone weighing up the trade. You spend years mastering one of the hardest physical skills in farming, shearing hundreds a day with calm hands and no harm to the animal, and the reward is twelve brutal weeks in summer and three quarters of a year with no work and no money. Nobody builds a life on that. So they don't, and who could blame them.

The shearers who fly in have solved the one problem Britain cannot. A top shearer works four countries a year, New Zealand, America, Britain, Australia, three months in each, chasing the season round the planet until twelve weeks becomes fifty. That is what makes it a career instead of a summer job, and no single country can recreate it, because no single country has more than one season.

There used to be British gangs on this circuit. Contractors who travelled, who trained the next lot, who knew every shed in the dale. That world thinned as the wool stopped paying and the young went to jobs that ran all year, and the gap was filled by the shearers who fly in, who now teach the British newcomers coming up, because the knowledge had nowhere else to live. Cut them off and you do not force Britain to train its own. You remove the last people still doing the teaching.

And this is what makes it so hard to stomach. Seventy-five people, in for twelve weeks, gone the day the job is done, costing the taxpayer nothing and leaving the flock shorn. If any arrival on earth is the useful kind, it is this one. A government serious about who comes and goes would fling the door open to exactly these people and spend its energy on the arrivals it genuinely cannot account for.

It has done the precise reverse. A hard No for the seventy-five it could see, needed and time-limit, while the numbers it cannot explain carry on untouched.

They looked at a skills chain held together by seasonal workers and decided the workers were the problem. They were the only reason it still existed.

[Dr Clare Craig @ClareCraigPath]

If you don't believe me about folic acid, perhaps you might believe the manufacturer?

Sign the petition below: 👇

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Your apple was washed to strip off the wax it grew itself, then sprayed with a beetle resin, an emulsifier Europe will not approve, fumigated with a gas that switches ripening off, and held for up to twelve months in air stripped to roughly one per cent oxygen.

That is one fruit. Here is the rest of the bowl.

- Orange: gassed with ethylene, then dyed where the gas fails.
- Grape: shipped on a metabisulfite pad releasing sulphur dioxide.
- Banana: picked green, shipped green, ripened in a gas room on arrival.
- Pear: same ripening blocker, so it stays hard until told otherwise.
- Mango, avocado, tomato: same blocker, same sealed rooms.

All of it legal, routine and invisible, on the one thing in the shop sold as having had nothing done to it.

Take morpholine, because it has the best paperwork. Shellac comes from the lac bug in India and Thailand, carnauba from a palm that grows only in Brazil, and neither will mix with water. Morpholine is the carrier that lets the coat go on thin and come up glossy, about 0.2 millilitres a fruit. It is permitted in America, Canada, Chile, South Africa and Australia, and has never been authorised in the European Union, for the excellent reason that nobody has ever filed an application.

In 2010 a laboratory found morpholine at two parts per million on apples shipped from Chile to Britain, and the Food Standards Agency ordered them off sale and returned to origin.

Then look at what it did with the citrus on the same lorry. It left it on the shelf. Apples are eaten unpeeled and oranges are not, so the identical compound was a legal problem on one fruit and an acceptable one on the next, decided by whether the customer swallows the outside.

Now the chemistry. Morpholine is a secondary amine. Amines meeting nitrite in the gut undergo nitrosation and form N-nitrosomorpholine, a genotoxic carcinogen in rodents, and the reaction has been demonstrated in human saliva. The largest source of dietary nitrate in an ordinary diet is not the bacon dragged through the press every fortnight. It is vegetables. Spinach, rocket, celery, beetroot.

So the salad brings the nitrite, the apple brings the amine, and they are introduced in your own stomach.

None of it exists for your benefit. Wax buys warehouse time. The gas rooms let an apple picked in September be sold as fresh the following August. Sulphur dioxide keeps a grape alive for fifty days at sea. Dye covers an orange that had the bad manners to ripen without changing colour. When Europe began enforcing on morpholine, the trade's answer was to argue it should be reclassified from an additive to a processing agent, which changes the rules without changing a molecule.

Meanwhile a cow is asked to account for her methane, and a sirloin arrives carrying a farm, a date and a name.

Nature gave the apple a coat. We washed it off and sold it a better one.

[D. Janković (aka Dog's Breakfast) @breakfast_dogs]

Is this the reason Yusen Zhou was killed?

Fauci was alerted up to novel hACE2 mice. The paper mentions mice that are already 30 weeks old, dating them to August 2019. Since SARS was eliminated, why invent a new ACE2 mouse model in 2019?

Well spotted @lafemme_nikkita!

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗