KMcGrath

Interested in Art, Politics, Governance and Nature.

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@TheShawnHendrix @DavidBranscum 🦋 Butterfly Effect…. The black swan….

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Breaking news: A Ford dealership in Kansas can't release a sold F-250 because a robin moved in first.

An employee at the dealership located outside Kansas City noticed a robin building a nest on the tire of a brand new F-250 that was already sold. The robin laid four eggs and successfully hatched them.

The truck is now stuck on the lot until the chicks fledge, because the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 makes it illegal to disturb an active nest of any native bird in the United States.

The buyer has been a good sport. The dealership called it the only F-250 in America currently protected under federal law.

[Cards of History @GodPlaysCards]

Perhaps the most unlikely paths to sainthood is going on an absolute rampage first.

But yet, here we are...

Let me introduce you to Olga of Kiev.

🔹Husband goes out to collect taxes.
🔹Gets split in two by the Drevlians.
🔹She's now a widow with a young son
🔹The Drevlians smell opportunity.
🔹 Ambassadors arrive by boat to propose marriage to their prince
🔹They expect a grieving woman but she buries them alive in the courtyard.
🔹Sends word back: "Send your finest men to honor me"
🔹More ambassadors arrive
🔹She offers them a bathhouse to wash after the journey.
🔹Locks the door and burns it down.
🔹Travels to Drevlian lands to mourn at Igor's grave.
🔹 Hosts a funeral feast in his honor.
🔹Gets them drunk
🔹Her men dispose of 5,000
🔹She's still mad.
🔹Lays siege to their capital, Iskorosten
🔹The siege drags on for a year.
🔹She asks for a humble tribute: three sparrows and three doves per household.
🔹They think they've gotten off easy.
🔹She ties burning rags to every bird and releases them outside he city walls.
🔹They fly home to roost.
🔹The city combusts and burns to the ground.
🔹Olga converts to Christianity.
🔹Built churches in Kievan Rus and worked to spread Christianity in the region
🔹The Orthodox Church canonizes her as a saint.

Quite the character arc if you'd ask me.

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@HeritageMatterz @lizaadamczewski @In_Otter_News2

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@psybertron @JamesMelville It has merit when said by Tom Hunter. He built his own business into Europe's largest independent retailer. From a £5k loan, to go on to be sold for £290m. Obviously someone who understands economic growth.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The British Vitamin D problem is not new.

Britain sits between 50 and 58 degrees north. London is on the same latitude as Calgary. Edinburgh is level with Moscow. From October to March, the sun does not rise high enough above the horizon for the UVB wavelength your skin needs to actually reach the ground. You can stand naked in February noon sunlight on the south coast and produce essentially zero vitamin D.

This is six months of the year, every year, for the entire history of human habitation on these islands.

The British have known this, in their bones, for ten thousand years.

Look at what was eaten in winter, before anyone had ever heard the term cholecalciferol:

Oily fish. Herring, mackerel, sprats, kippers. Three or four times a week from October to March. A single kipper carries roughly 250 IU of D3.

Cod liver oil. Spooned into every British child between 1850 and 1980, a teaspoon at a time. Distributed free by the Ministry of Food in the war on the explicit understanding that British children needed it through the dark months. Rickets fell by 90 per cent between 1940 and 1960. Cod liver oil was the reason.

Liver. Eaten weekly in working households until 1985.

Egg yolks from hens that had been outside in the summer.

Grass-fed butter, made from cream from cows on summer pasture, the fat-soluble vitamins banked into the cream and eaten through the winter.

The British solution to the British problem, evolved over centuries by people who could not articulate the biochemistry but knew, with absolute certainty, what kept the children growing through the dark months.

Then between 1955 and 2010, the British removed almost all of them.

Cod liver oil reduced to a niche supplement. Liver dropped from weekly to never. Oily fish consumption halved. Eggs rationed by the Department of Health on cholesterol grounds since retracted. Butter replaced with margarine carrying no fat-soluble vitamins at all.

Result, by 2020: roughly half of all British adults are vitamin D deficient by the end of winter. A third of children. Rickets has reappeared in British paediatric wards. The NHS now recommends every adult take a supplement from October to March.

This is the NHS recommending in 2026 what the British diet was doing automatically in 1926.

The geography has not changed. The latitude is the same. The sun is still inadequate from October.

The food used to handle it.

The kippers are still being smoked at Craster. The cod liver oil is on the chemist's shelf. The liver is at the butcher. The butter is in the dairy aisle, behind the spreads.

The sun was always seasonal.

The food was the backup.

The backup got thrown out.

Get it back.

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@GWmag 'La Belle Époque” Tulip

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@BentMathiesen @archpng But the lineage remains, and it is now set in Bee 🐝 histories, of the great fire. Passed down from Bee to Bee. 🐝

[Skratch @Skratch]

This squirrel might be the only thing that can stop Rory now. 😭

[The Cultural Tutor @culturaltutor]

The opposite of the equinox is the solstice.

They come between the equinoxes, when the sun is either furthest away or closest. One is in June and the other in December.

The Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year; the Winter Solstice the shortest.

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Finally!

[The Weather Channel @weatherchannel]

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, predicting six more weeks of winter. #GroundhogDay

[Mytho Britannia @MythoBritannia]

A Christmas reminder that there is a native herd of reindeer in Scotland, seen here treading a path through the deep Cairngorms snow.

[𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗠𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗰 ✨🎵 @Hoang_HQ]

Amazing😍😍
🎶✨Carol of the bells

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@Simmons__ Really enjoyed ‘Benjamin Disraeli to Rachel Reeves’ podcast. Thank you.

[Rosslyn Chapel @Rosslynchapel]

Happy St. Andrew’s Day! #StAndrewsDay #Scotland @VisitScotland @VisitMidlothian

[VeryBritishProblems @SoVeryBritish]

Someone just asked me if I was “ready for Christmas.”

It is the 24th of November. I'm not even ready for this afternoon.

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Breaking: Jane Goodall, the English primatologist and anthropologist who was considered a foremost expert on chimpanzees, has died at age 91. https://t.co/SiHKaOX38n

[Carl Bovis @CarlBovisNature]

Blue Tit on blackberries! 😍
Taken this weekend at RSPB Greylake in Somerset. 😊🐦

[KMcGrath @klmcgra]

@KonstantinKisin In Opposition; Reform, SNP, Conservatives, Your Party, Lib Dems, Senior Labour Backbenchers. Independent MPs .
Official public petition signatures at 720k.
From all across the wide political spectrum there appears to be only opposition.