With everything we are hearing right now about ticks this seems like good information to share.
“Here’s what I’ve learned after more ticks than I care to count.
First, whatever your uncle told you, forget it. No matches. No nail polish. No Vaseline. No soap on a cotton ball. All of those do the same terrible thing, they stress the tick out, and a stressed tick empties its gut back into the bite before letting go. Which, if you think about what that actually means for a second, is literally how Lyme and the rest get transmitted so you’re not speeding up its exit. You’re making it throw up into you.
Fine-tipped tweezers. Grip right where the mouthparts enter the skin, not the body, the head. Pull straight up, steady, no twisting, no jerking. It’ll feel like it’s resisting because it is, the mouthparts are barbed. Just keep the pressure on and it lets go in a few seconds. If a piece breaks off in the skin, leave it alone. Your body pushes splinters out. Digging around with a needle does more damage then the fragment ever would.
Clean it with alcohol or soap. Wash your hands.
Now here’s the part most people skip: don’t flush the tick.
Tape it to an index card. Clear packing tape right over the body, write the date and where on your body it was, and stick the card in a drawer. If you come down with anything weird in the next 30 days, rash, fever, joint pain, that flu-that-isn’t-flu feeling, that tick goes with you to the doctor. Some labs will test the tick itself, which is faster and often more reliable than waiting for antibodies to show up in your own blood. A dated tick taped to a card is one of the most useful things you can hand a doctor who’s trying to figure out what’s wrong with you.
The other thing worth saying out loud: if the tick was engorged when you pulled it, and you can’t swear it was off your body within 24 hours, call your doctor that same day. Don’t wait for a rash. Fewer than three out of four Lyme cases even produce the classic bullseye. A single preventive dose of doxycycline within 72 hours of a deer tick bite cuts the Lyme odds way down, and most docs in tick country will write that prescription without giving you a hard time, especially if you walk in with the tick taped to a card and a clear timeline.”
You don’t need to worry about a wild hantavirus pandemic. You do need to worry about self-replicating mRNA being injected into people’s pets. This is madness! Especially in light of this report in @NatureBiotech (first reply), arriving 5 years after it should have been obvious.
Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
I’m not sure apologies are necessary unless people bought into the “Trump can do no wrong” crowd.
2024 gave us 3 sub-par candidates
1 was completely unviable.
1 was certain to lead to low intelligence communism.
And then Trump, a dude with a terrible record for spending, building more government, and a gift of a pied piper like ability to get masses of people to change their beliefs based on his opinion.
Trump 2.0 promised change. DOGE was set up, coalitions were being made with MAHA and libertarians. Wars were set to end.
And then it came crashing down.
Libertarians and independents don’t need to apologize for voting for or supporting the least worst candidate.
They should be thanking him for the apocalypse he has given.
Apocalypse means unveiling or uncovering. What Trump has given us is an unveiling that the nature of our government is so corrupt, that even a billionaire can be bought and manipulated to serve the Deep State he claimed to declare war on.
This should be an enlightenment for people who cling to hope that the federal government can be salvaged or used for good.
It can not.
Can we put people in place to slow down the process of inevitable collapse? Sure.
But that’s the way it’s heading.
The Trump 2.0 admin just shows how even an Avengers tier team can’t keep it from happening.
Is that sad or scary?
Sure.
But the longer we pretend it’s not reality, the harder it’s going to be when it does come down.
Thanks for the apocalypse, Trump.
A 24–week-old baby holds the thumb of a doctor post-birth.
Born weighing 600 grams, with 10 fingers and tiny toes.
This child isn’t “just a clump of cells,” but a human baby, valuable and worth fighting for.
WOW! THIS IS REMARKABLE!
An Italian physicist by the name of Paolo Di Lazzaro spent 5 years trying to reproduce the body image seen on the Shroud of Turin, and no matter what or how he tried he just couldn’t.
Using intense UV light, he and his team were able to create small areas of discoloration on linen, however recreating the full image was absolutely impossible with modern technology.
So, according to Biblical scholar Jeremiah Johnston, Di Lazzaro estimated the process would require an extraordinary burst of energy that we just can’t recreate on earth.
"Paolo told me it would take 34,000 billion watts of energy traveling in one 40th of a billionth of a second to change the chemical makeup of a fine linen shroud to leave that image and we simply don’t have that type of power.”
“There would be a chemical change to the shroud that if it had lasted longer than one 40th of a billionth of a second, it would've scorched.”
.@POTUS@WhiteHouse@realDonaldTrump Now is past the time to send in the troops and invoke the insurrection act. As someone living in MN, I am begging you to protect @ICEgov and the rest of us who stand with the law.
🚨 BREAKING: American Veterans are now signing up to become ICE agents, including COMBAT Veterans - and liberals are angry about it
MUSIC TO MY EARS!
"Liberals, I need you to listen up. Going forward in 2026, it's not a good idea to continue this aggression during your protests."
"I'm sitting here putting in an ICE application, right? And when I'm talking about it here, I've had hundreds of my brothers and sisters at arms, my fellow Veterans, say, no, I'm joining up too!"
"I already signed up. I'll leave for training, whatever, whatever. A lot of Veterans are joining ICE right now."
"Projections are saying like somewhere north of 100,000. And I'm willing to bet the vast majority of them are going to be Veterans, combat Veterans."
"We're talking a class of American citizens, blue collar type, that are trained, that willingly signed up to shoot at and get shot back at."
"Signs and screaming in cars. Oh no, don't do it. Don't do it. You need to understand something, liberal. We're talking about people who have been blown up and stood back up to return fire."
"A lot of us veterans, we take our oath seriously to defend our country against enemies, both foreign and domestic."
"I don't think it's going to be an intelligent idea going forward to present yourselves as enemies domestic."
"Keep your goofy a** on the sidewalk, stay out folks' way."
h/t @EstieMaddie
At 6:50 PM CT, federal law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted traffic stop in Minneapolis of an illegal alien from Venezuela who was released into the country by Joe Biden in 2022.
In an attempt to evade arrest, the subject fled the scene in his vehicle and crashed into a parked car. The subject then fled on foot.
The law enforcement officer caught up to the subject on foot and attempted to apprehend him when the subject began to resist and violently assault the officer. While the subject and law enforcement were in a struggle on the ground, two subjects came out of a nearby apartment and also attacked the law enforcement officer with a snow shovel and broom handle.
As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, the original subject got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick.
Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. The initial subject was hit in the leg.
All three subjects ran back into the apartment and barricaded themselves inside.
The attacked officer and subject are both in the hospital. Both attackers are in custody.
This attack on another brave member of law enforcement took place while Minnesota’s top leaders, Governor Walz and Mayor Frey, are actively encouraging an organized resistance to ICE and federal law enforcement officers.
Their hateful rhetoric and resistance against men and women who are simply trying to do their jobs must end. Federal law enforcement officers are facing a 1,300% increase in assaults against them as they put their lives on the line to arrest criminals and lawbreakers.
.@GovTimWalz has refused to cooperate with ICE and released nearly 470 criminal illegal aliens back onto the streets of Minnesota to terrorize Americans.
It is common sense. Criminal illegal aliens should not be released back onto our streets.
We are calling on Governor Walz to cooperate with @ICEgov and honor the arrest detainers for the more than 1,360 criminal illegal aliens in his custody.
Some of the worst of the worst released include:
Khamenei’s terrorists are spraying Iranians with bullets in the streets.
This footage broke through the digital blackout using an Iraqi SIM.
Volume up.
Bro he was shooting an AR in the air in a residential apartment complex
And when an off duty ice agent WHO LIVED THERE told him to stop firing an AR in the air, Porter instead aimed at the ice agent and fired at him multiple times lmao
…THEN he got shot by ICE.
HOLY SHIT. Democrats tried to amend a bill that would ALLOW illegal aliens who commit fraud to REMAIN in the country INDEFINITELY.
Democrats are the party of fraud and criminal invaders.