Elizabeth Powell 💙💛

Mom, lawyer. Gardener on the forest floor. Rabid housing advocate.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

Remember when presidents visited disaster zones? Now we spend $60 million and deploy 494 port-a-potties so a sitting president can attend a UFC fight. Somewhere, the Founding Fathers are updating their résumés.

[Dark Hunter Brandon @darkhunterbrndn]

Guys I gotta tell you,
My dad's '68 Corvette Stingray goes from 0-60 in 5 seconds which is 3 hours faster than Trump deploying the DC National Guard to a violent insurrection at the Capitol

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Almost nobody knows the entire fear of cholesterol began with a rabbit.

>be a Russian pathologist, 1913
>wonder what furs up human arteries
>test it on rabbits, naturally
>feed them mountains of purified cholesterol dissolved in oil
>the rabbits, who have never met the stuff in their lives, fur up
>publish immediately
>announce to the world that dietary cholesterol causes heart disease
>decline to mention that a rabbit is a herbivore
>or that grass contains no cholesterol
>or that the animal has no machinery for handling it
>you have poisoned a vegetarian and billed it as a breakthrough

A herbivore, fed an animal product it was never built to eat, in doses nothing in nature could meet.

That is the foundation stone of the cholesterol scare.

Humans are not rabbits. We have eaten cholesterol since there were humans.

The whole edifice rests on one bewildered bunny.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Every new chapter needs someone to walk into it first, and at Rhug the someone is two weeks old and the colour of a fox.

Seren is past the worst of the wobbling now. The legs, which a week ago she operated like rented equipment, have mostly been negotiated with and largely won.

She still runs the mad dusk laps, all four feet leaving the ground at once for no reason anyone has been able to establish. She still misjudges the wallow and arrives in it sideways. She still keeps one deeply suspicious eye on the woodpecker, which has done nothing to her and which she has decided, on no evidence whatsoever, to distrust on principle.

But there is a new thing in her this week that the estate manager has been watching with something he will not name. She has started to go first.

Not far, never far. But where in the first days she shadowed Freya at the flank and let her mother decide every question about the ground, now there are moments when Seren steps out ahead, noses toward a new part of the wood, tests a slope her mother has not yet committed to.

And the herd, the great cautious matriarchal herd that came through the eye of a needle, drifts after the youngest animal in it to see what she has found. Last week what she had found was a puddle. They investigated it with enormous seriousness. It was a very good puddle. She was extremely proud.

This is how a species re-learns a place. Not only the old ones teaching the young, though that is most of it. Sometimes the young one, with no memory of the long absence and no fear of the new ground, simply walks into a corner of the wood that has had no bison in it for six thousand years, and the old ones follow her in, and the corner has a bison in it again because the youngest decided it should.

The calf is leading. In small ways, for short distances, under the close eye of a mother who would flatten the weather itself to keep her safe. But leading.

There is a great deal unfolding in this universe just now. An old soldier come to rest, a romance long denied, a litter on the way, a pup learning his trade, new chapters opening in every field.

But the one walking out in front of all of it, into ground her kind forgot, is a two-week-old calf who does not know she is first.

She is the new beginning the others are following. She has no idea. She is too busy being the colour of a fox, leading a herd of half-tonne adults to a puddle, and keeping an eye on a bird that has never once looked back.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Wool grows back every year on grass and rain. It warms you better than plastic and feeds the soil when it wears out. We let the trade collapse anyway.

Here is how anyone, anywhere, can help bring it back.

- Read the label. Most "fleece" is plastic. Choose real wool.

- Buy your bed back from oil. Wool duvets breathe, resist fire, and outlast synthetics by decades.

- Put wool underfoot. A wool carpet lasts a generation. Nylon sheds microplastic with every step.

- Insulate with it. Sheep's wool beats foam, and foam is just oil.

- Buy close to the animal. Straight from farms keeps the money with the shearer.

- Compost the old stuff. A wool jumper rots back into the ground. Polyester outlives your grandchildren.

- Back it where the big orders are. Hotels, uniforms, fire rules. They could all specify wool tomorrow.

- Learn the craft. Knit, weave, felt. Every stitch is a vote.

This belongs to no one country. Merino off an Australian ewe, Rambouillet from the American west, Shetland, Harris Tweed. Half the world's wool sits unloved while we dress in oil.

None of this needs a hashtag. Just ordinary choices, made on purpose.

The sheep have done their part for ten thousand years. The rest is us, reading the label.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

On a hillside this summer, a man will pay good money to take the coat off a sheep, then watch that coat earn him almost nothing at all.

This is the wool trade now. A thing his great grandfather built a life on, worn down to a chore he runs at a loss.

So look at the maths square in the face. It costs him around two pounds to shear one ewe. The fleece that comes off her, even now, in the best year for a decade, brings back about a pound and a half if she is a fine crossbred. If she is a hill sheep, a Welsh Mountain or a Swaledale, he might get thirty pence for the whole fleece. British Wool says the price would have to nearly double again just to cover the shearing.

So every sheep he clips, he loses on. And he has to clip every one.

A sheep left in her fleece overheats, cannot walk right, and gets eaten alive by maggots. The wool has to come off, for her sake, whatever it is worth. He pays, quite literally, for the privilege of being kind to his own animals.

Now feel the weight of what we have let go.

Wool once made this country rich. Whole towns were built on the back of it, and the great wool churches still standing across the Cotswolds were paid for with it. To this day the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a woolsack, set there centuries ago so nobody in the room would forget where England's wealth came from.

A fleece was worth fourteen pounds a kilo in the 1950s. The wool cheque, in his father's day, paid the rent for the year.

Today it will not cover the diesel to deliver it.

And so, in farmyards across the country, men who would rather not are quietly burning the fleeces off their own sheep, because a fire is cheaper than the trip to the depot. A material so fine that a kingdom was built on it, going up in smoke in the yard because nobody will pay a pound for it.

And what did we reach for instead. Plastic. Most of our clothes are now spun from oil, polyester and acrylic and nylon, shedding tiny threads into the sea with every wash, into the fish, into our own blood. It will not rot for generations.

So here we stand. A fibre that grows back every spring on nothing but grass and rain, that warms a child and then feeds the soil when its work is done, burning unwanted in a field.

While we dress ourselves, head to foot, in the very oil it was meant to spare us.

The sheep on that hill is still growing the finest coat in the world. We simply stopped being worthy of it.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

A Republican county attorney just accused Stephen Miller's legal organization of attempting an "unprecedented power grab" over election administration.
Not a Democrat.
A Republican.
This story should be front-page news.
https://t.co/LIUmDCCI3Y

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

On December 31, 2020, US Rep. Jamie Raskin announced that his 25-year-old son Tommy, a second-year student at Harvard Law School, had died.

Four days later, Raskin posted a tribute that revealed, after a prolonged battle with depression, Tommy had died by suicide.

In a farewell note, the 25-year-old said, "Please forgive me. My illness won today. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor. All my love, Tommy."

Tommy was buried on January 5, 2021.

The next day, Raskin was in the Capitol with his daughter and son-in-law during the Capitol attack.

Hours later, he started drafting an article of impeachment against Trump, and six days later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi named Raskin the lead manager of Trump's second impeachment.

Today, Raskin is still one of the loudest critics of the current president, one of the most progressive leaders in Congress, and one of the strongest people — period.

Our current president bullies him on social media weekly.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

The most chilling warning about election administration this year didn't come from a Democrat.
It came from a Republican county attorney in Arizona.
And almost nobody is talking about it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A ewe died lambing in the night, which happens, and left a single lamb, which also happens, and the lamb was given to Eduardo, which does not usually happen, and is the reason there is an alpaca in this story at all.

The orphan was the problem every shepherd dreads, a day-old lamb with no mother, too small to defend, the exact thing a fox prices up at dusk. The farmer could have brought it indoors to bottle-rear, and might yet, but he tried something first, because Eduardo was in the field and Eduardo is what he is.

Alpacas guard. It is why the farmer keeps one in with the sheep, the watchfulness bred into a creature that spent thousands of years as a sentinel on Andean hillsides, the instinct to put itself between a threat and the herd and to face down a fox until the fox does the arithmetic and leaves. What the farmer was not sure of was whether that instinct would extend to a lamb that was not even a fellow alpaca, an orphan of another species set down in the grass.

It extended. Eduardo went over, did the long careful camelid inspection, the humming and the close looking, and then simply stayed. Where the lamb went, the alpaca went, at a distance of a few feet, all day, a tall watchful shadow over a small wobbling one. At dusk, when a lamb alone would have been a fox's evening, the lamb was not alone. It was lying tucked against the legs of an animal that does not run from foxes and never has.

The lamb is alive a week on, which a lamb in that position frequently is not. It thinks, as far as anyone can tell, that it is a small strange alpaca, and follows Eduardo about, and Eduardo permits this with the air of a creature who has acquired a responsibility he did not ask for and intends to discharge properly anyway.

The farmer watches them, the alpaca and the lamb that is not his, and reflects that he keeps Eduardo for the fibre and the guarding and the comedy, and got, thrown in for nothing, a creature who will mother an orphan of the wrong species through the dangerous first week because something in him simply cannot watch a small thing be undefended.

That was not in the brochure. The best things on a farm rarely are.

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

We need to flood Twitter with this birthday card on June 14th.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

TRUMP: “I’m not concerned about the latest inflation numbers that came out this morning. I love it. I love the inflation.”

At this point I’m convinced Trump is intentionally trying to destroy the United States.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Activist: "Take the cows off and you stop all that carbon going up."

Farmer: "Stop it going where? The grass still grows, and the grass still dies."

Activist: "But the cow's not eating it."

Farmer: "So it topples over in autumn and rots instead, and the soil microbes return its carbon to the air anyway. Same carbon, same destination. You've just removed the bit in the middle where someone got fed. The field breathes out either way."

Activist: "It's slower without the cow."

Farmer: "And it's the same carbon, on loan from this spring's air, going back where it came from. The cow doesn't conjure new carbon out of nowhere. She borrows it from the grass and hands most of it straight back. Remove her and the loop still turns, minus the dinner."

Activist: "There's still her methane."

Farmer: "A brief detour on a wheel that's turning regardless, gone from the air in a decade. You're trying to switch off a cycle the sun and the grass started long before the cow showed up."

Activist: "..."

Farmer: "The grass dies whether she eats it or not. She just turns the rotting into a roast on the way past."

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There was a disease so common in industrial Britain that the rest of the world simply called it the English disease.

It was rickets. The bones of children, growing soft for want of a single missing factor, bending under the child's own weight. Bowed legs, curved spines, deformed pelvises, the skeleton failing to set hard the way it should. In the sunless, soot-blackened slums of the industrial cities it was everywhere, a routine feature of working-class childhood, and nobody knew quite why.

In 1919 a researcher named Edward Mellanby set out to find the cause. He took dogs, fed them on the staple of the poor, porridge and little else, kept them indoors away from the sun, and produced rickets in them to order. Then he cured it. The cure was cod liver oil. A fat pressed from the liver of a fish, spooned into the diet, and the soft bones hardened.

What Mellanby had found, though it took a few more years to name precisely, was that rickets was a deficiency disease. The bones needed a fat-soluble factor we now call vitamin D, available either from sunlight on the skin or from animal fats in the food, and the slum child, short of both, got neither. He also noticed something the cereal companies would never print on a packet. The oats themselves, the wholesome porridge, contained compounds that actively interfered with the minerals the bones needed. The grain was working against them. Its own compounds bound up the very minerals the bones were crying out for.

So here is the shape of it. Take a population, move it into sunless cities, feed its children on grain and very little animal fat, and their skeletons fail to form correctly on a mass scale. Then give them a daily spoon of fish-liver fat, and the failure reverses.

For a few generations afterwards, British schools and clinics handed out cod liver oil as a matter of course, and the children grew up with straight legs because of it. Then, somewhere along the way, we decided animal fats were the enemy, and the spoonful quietly disappeared.

The body never changed its requirements. It still needs the fat-soluble vitamins that come, in any useful concentration, from animals.

The bones of children have been making this argument for two hundred years. We keep deciding we know better than the bones.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

There was a generation that did not make a fuss.

You knew them. Some of you are them. Men who came back from things they never spoke about, sat down to a plate of liver and onions, and got on with the week. Women who ran households on rationing and willpower and never once announced they were overwhelmed. They had a phrase for it. Least said, soonest mended.

We have decided, in our wisdom, that this was repression. That they were bottling it all up and it did them harm. There is something to that, in the extreme cases. But we threw out the whole practice along with the worst of it, and replaced it with a culture that treats every fleeting feeling as a fact that must be broadcast at once.

They ate proper food. Meat, eggs, butter, offal, dripping on bread. Their brains had the materials. And on top of that they carried a code, learned without ever calling it philosophy, that said you do not inflict your every passing storm on the people around you.

Hardware and software, in a flat cap.

None of this is new. Composure was ordinary once, and then it quietly went out of fashion. Some of us are walking back to find it, with a fork in one hand and Marcus Aurelius in the other.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Derek is fifty-three, lives in Dudley, and in 1992 he is, by every official measure, a model citizen.

The government has just published The Health of the Nation. There are leaflets at the surgery. There is a man on the news with a pointer. The message could not be clearer: the fat is killing you, Derek, and the experts have done the sums.

So Derek has done as he was told.

7am. The fry-up is a memory. The eggs went years ago, struck off twice over, once for the cholesterol and once in 1988 when a junior minister announced the nation's eggs were full of salmonella and the nation, obligingly, panicked. Breakfast is bran flakes and semi-skimmed, the milkman having been instructed to leave the white stuff instead of the gold top, the cream having turned out to be the enemy hiding in plain sight on the doorstep all along. He washes it down with orange juice, which carries about as much sugar as a glass of cola but has a drawing of an orange on the carton, and is therefore medicine.

10am. Derek is hungry. This is strange, as he has eaten breakfast, but he assumes the experts have factored it in. He has a Ryvita. It tastes of a beige envelope. He feels he has done something noble.

1pm. Lunch is a jacket potato, naked, because butter is now effectively a controlled substance, dressed instead with a thin smear of St Ivel Gold, a spread sold in adverts so grimly threatening they implied Derek might drop dead at the table without it. A Shape yoghurt, fat-free, the fat having been taken out and replaced, pound for pound, with sugar, though the leaflet is quiet on that bit. A Diet Coke, because Derek is watching himself.

4pm. The sugar has drained out of Derek and left him grey, trembling, and quietly furious with a colleague named Brian. He puts this down to stress at work. He has another Ryvita. The Ryvita does not help.

7pm. Dinner. A chicken breast, skinned and grilled to the colour, texture, and emotional warmth of a flannel, because the skin is fat and fat is death and the poster was very firm on this. Boiled veg. A dry potato, again. Derek fries nothing now. He has been told the one safe fat is vegetable oil, which the same posters call heart-loving, but the messaging has worked so completely that he flinches at all fat equally and grills everything he owns out of an abundance of terror.

9pm. A Slim-Fast, because Derek has noticed that, after a year of impeccable behaviour, he is somehow getting fatter, and a confident man on the television has explained that the solution is a milkshake.

By bedtime Derek has eaten less fat than his grandfather got through before he'd finished shaving, rather more sugar than his grandfather saw in a fortnight, and has been hungry since roughly half past ten that morning.

His grandfather, for the record, ate eggs and bacon and bread fried in dripping every day of his working life, never knowingly read a leaflet, and died at eighty-eight, faintly amused by the whole business.

Derek did everything the posters asked of him. The posters were the thing that was wrong with him.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Consider the quiet atrocities people committed, for decades, all to watch their cholesterol.

The fat trimmed off the steak and left on the plate. The best part, binned for being the best part.

The egg yolks tipped down the sink. The choline, the vitamins, the whole point of the egg, gone.

The egg-white omelette. A sad, weeping heap of protein, mourning its lost yolks.

Fat-free cheese. A rubbery orange substance that has never met a cow.

Skimmed milk. Cloudy water, sold at a premium for having its goodness removed.

Margarine on the toast, because industrial oil felt safer than butter.

The skin off the chicken. The crackling abandoned. The dripping down the drain.

A yoghurt shot each morning to nudge a number, in place of a breakfast that would have fed them.

The steak passed over for the dry chicken salad. Ordered with a sigh, by a grown adult.

And at the end of it, the statin anyway, to finish what the misery could not.

All that suffering to dodge the cholesterol in food. The same cholesterol that barely moves the cholesterol in your blood.

Because your body makes most of its own, and simply makes less when you eat more.

A fear of animal fat is, at root, an anti-human idea.

It is the fat that grew our brains, fuelled our bodies, and carried our species for two million years.

To recoil from it is to recoil from ourselves.

[Glen Carroll @MrGlenCarroll]

The Ultimate Irony Elon Musk Never Saw Coming

Remember when Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, rebranded it to X, fired everyone who knew how to run it, and turned it into a right-wing echo chamber so he could help Trump win?

Yeah. About that.

Because out of the shadows comes Dark Brandon Junior — and he's running laps around the entire MAGA ecosystem.

Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) marked 7 years clean and sober on June 1. Instead of hiding, he posted a video thanking his recovery community. Then the trolls came for him. And instead of clapping back with anger, he disarmed them with something MAGA doesn't know how to fight: self-deprecating wit, radical honesty, and zero fs given.*

When someone accused him of leaving that White House coke behind, Hunter replied: "It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs."

When someone photoshopped a pipe in his mouth, he corrected them: "A crack pipe doesn't have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can't trust AI."

When a user said they'd vote for him if he made a crack joke campaign ad, Hunter fired back: "How about 'Let's take another crack with a Biden.' Needs work but the possibilities are endless."

The result? Even his former MAGA tormentors are apologizing. One user called him "the MAGA whisperer." Hunter's reply summed up the whole damn problem: "Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We're being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we're at each other's throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery."

Meanwhile, I posted a side-by-side: Don Jr. looking like he just crawled out of a three-day bender vs. a clean, sober, sharp-witted Hunter Biden. Asked a simple question: Which first son's family would you trust with American democracy?

You know what's beautiful? Elon Musk spent billions to control the narrative. And now Hunter Biden — the man they spent years trying to destroy — is using X to unite Democrats who felt voiceless, shame trolls with humor, and remind everyone what actual redemption looks like.

So here's my message to every Democrat clutching their pearls about "messaging" and "optics":

Stop. Just stop.

Hunter Biden is out here doing more for Democratic morale than half the party's consultants. He's not running for anything. He's not farming for clicks. He's just speaking like the Americans his father and our parents raised — honest, unafraid, and unwilling to let bullies define him.

Meanwhile, the other side nominated a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and didn't blink. They don't do purity tests. They do power.

So let's be clear: Laugh at the memes. Share the posts. Tag @HunterBiden every chance you get. Because every time you do, you remind people that redemption is real, that sobriety is worth celebrating, and that the party of "family values" spent years attacking a man for his addiction while their own golden boy Don Jr. can't even keep his eyes open in public photos.

Elon Musk, thank you. Without you, we wouldn't have Hunter Biden lighting up your own platform with truth, humor, and the kind of unscripted humanity MAGA can never fake.

#DarkBrandonJunior #MAGAWhisperer #HunterBiden #SobrietyWins #X #ElonMusk #DemocratsUnited #smokefléét

[GotoChelle ™ 🇺🇸💙 @chelleyourself]

This guy is a researcher and always has receipts. He is being throttled hard! Please follow! Be part of the real changes that are coming!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Two hives went into Dave's orchard corner this spring, and Keith, who has assessed and tested and dismantled every single thing on that farm, has assessed the bees exactly once and elected, for the first time in his life, to leave a thing entirely alone.

This is genuinely without precedent. Keith tests everything. He has eaten a latch, a pocket square, a set of water heater instructions, and the better part of Dave's left wellington. He climbs what cannot be climbed and opens what cannot be opened and investigates the world with a relentless prehensile curiosity that has cost Dave three hundred and eighty-seven pounds in gates. There is no object in his domain he has not, at some point, put his lips to in the spirit of enquiry.

He walked up to the hives on the first day. Dave watched from the yard with the specific dread of a man who has seen this goat approach things before. Keith stood in front of the nearest hive. He watched the entrance, the constant stream of bees coming and going, the low working hum of forty thousand individuals about their business. He brought his nose to within a sensible distance. He held there for a while, doing whatever calculation it is that goes on behind those rectangular eyes.

And then he stepped back, turned, and walked away to the bramble, and he has not gone near the hives since.

Dave's log: "He left the bees. I don't know what passed between Keith and the bees. Whatever it was, the bees won the negotiation without appearing to negotiate, which is the only time anything on this farm has managed it. I have not added a column. I am simply relieved."

There is a kind of intelligence that tests everything to find its limit. And there is a rarer kind that meets a thing humming with quiet collective purpose and recognises, without needing to be stung, that here at last is something better left to get on with its work.

Keith has both. The bees are fine. The bees were always going to be fine. Even Keith knows where the line is, and the line, it turns out, is forty thousand of anything, all agreeing.