I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.
The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.
Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.
Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.
The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.
Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."
They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.
If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.
Republicans in North Carolina just proposed a bill that says if a woman is caught with an IUD or attempts to get an abortion then men are allowed to use DEADLY FORCE to try and stop her. They are proposing a bill that will allow men to kill women for using birth control. It’s House Bill 1232. Keith Kidwell is the Republican who proposed the bill. He claims it counts as self defense to use deadly force to stop abortion. This is a man who claims to be pro life. Feel free to give his office a call and let him know how you feel about his opinion.
And for anyone who says “obviously this will never get passed” that’s not the point. The point is it’s fucking insanity that a government official would even try to make a law like this. It’s insanity that there are men out there who are trying to make it legal to kill women for making decisions for their own bodies. This is real and it’s happening right now in front of our eyes.
Mexico paid $20 million for eight minutes in this movie. Then those eight minutes forced them to invent an entire cultural tradition.
Before Spectre, Mexico City had no Day of the Dead parade. The holiday was celebrated at home, at cemeteries, with family altars. Quiet, intimate, centuries old. Sam Mendes fabricated a massive street parade for the opening sequence, shot it with 1,500 extras in skeleton costumes across the Zócalo, and audiences worldwide assumed they were watching a real annual event.
Mexico's government had negotiated hard for the placement. Leaked Sony hack emails showed officials offered up to $20 million in tax incentives for four minutes of positive portrayal. Sony was drowning in a $300 million budget. The deal included script changes: the Bond girl had to be a Mexican actress, the villain could not be Mexican, and the city's modern skyline had to appear on screen.
Then the movie opened in 182 countries and tourists started booking flights to Mexico City for the parade.
The parade that did not exist.
Tourism authorities panicked. Visitors were arriving expecting the spectacle they saw in the film and finding nothing. So in October 2016, the government spent $500,000, hired 650 volunteers, built dozens of floats and giant skeleton marionettes, and staged the first real Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City's history. 250,000 people showed up. They openly called it a "Spectre-style parade" in press materials.
Ten years later, the parade draws millions. Anthropologists call it the "pizza effect," where a cultural element gets exported, transformed abroad, and reimported as authentic. Mexico's most famous public celebration of its most sacred holiday was invented by a British director shooting a $300 million spy movie.
That tracking shot is doing more for Mexico City's economy every November than the $20 million they paid for it.
BREAKING: Adam Hoffman has been released from jail for "good behavior."
Hoffman is the 49-year-old Waco, TX attorney who faced life without parole for repeatedly raping a young boy, until Texas AG Ken Paxton offered him 1 day in jail and no need to register as a sex offender. A judge increased his sentence to a whopping 60 days. He got out in 30 days.
This is MAGA's vision for the USA. Full story: https://t.co/cU1WnZKAfr
This is Adam Hoffman. He repeatedly raped a Texas boy — for nearly three years — dozens and dozens of times.
Tomorrow morning, May 25th 2026, he will be released from McLennan County Jail after spending just a few weeks there. He will not be required to register as a sex offender. And very soon he’ll be allowed to practice law again.
A real and dangerous predator — a present threat to Texas children — will be as free as you and me. A slap on his wrist and a spit in the face to his victim.
Why?! How?!
Because that’s the deal he made with Ken Paxton.
Vote accordingly.
Erin Brockovich has launched a website and has begun tracking all data centers in America and logging resident complaints
In just 1 week it’s already logged 1,690 resident complaints
For this who don’t remember
Erin Brockovich was the paralegal responsible for winning out a case against PG&E, Hinckley in California, because their wastewater runoff was seeping into rural areas and creating a lot of health issues for, for the surrounding neighborhoods
That case brought in a $333 million settlement that went to the families affected by the situation because a lot of them either had staggering medical bills due to their tap water was no longer safe
So why is this important, well residents all over America are reporting their tap water and river water is being heavily polluted by data centers
Her map of data centers is new, she just launched it
The website features an interactive US map showing operational, under-construction, and proposed AI data centers, overlaid with community-reported complaints
Residents can submit reports with details, photos, and locations. Within days of launch, it received a surge of submissions over 1,600 in the first week, and reports of 1,800+ from 47 states shortly after
Common Resident Complaints Being Logged
- Water usage
- Raising utility bills for residents
- Noise pollution: Constant 24/7 humming from fans, generators, and cooling systems disrupting sleep, daily life, and wildlife.
- E-waste from frequent hardware upgrades, pollution including PFAS concerns
The USDA has kept raccoon rabies out of the central United States for over 30 years by air-dropping fish-flavored ravioli from helicopters.
Each one is a small packet coated in fishmeal with an oral rabies vaccine inside. Raccoons, foxes, coyotes, and skunks find them by smell, bite through, and swallow.
Many animals that consume the bait develop immunity, helping build a protective barrier across populations.
The bait is generally considered safe for pets and tested in many non-target species.
The USDA's Wildlife Services has been running this since 1995. Without the bait program, raccoon rabies very likely would have spread much further west.
A federal program you've probably never heard of is protecting your pets and your kids by feeding wild animals ravioli from a helicopter.
we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through a fungal network. Where octopuses dream.
Where elephants return to the bones of the deceased and stand over them in silence. Where bees use dance to communicate where to fly and where the flower is.
Where crows remember the faces of people who were cruel to them and pass this memory to their children.
Where ants build cities. Where cats purr at a frequency that accelerates the healing of bones.
Where, after a forest fire, the first thing the earth does is grow flowers.
This isn't AI, it's the Huajiang Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, China, the world's highest bridge at 625 meters above the river beneath it.
It features a man-made waterfall created by diverting karst spring water discovered during tunnel construction.
Half of all kids used to die before age 15. Today, 96% live to grow up. The boom you see on that chart is the world finally figuring out how to keep its kids alive.
Women were having fewer kids the whole time. In 1950, the average woman had 5. Today it's 2.2. The world's population still went from 1.6 billion in 1900 to over 8 billion now. More of those kids just kept growing up.
The first big shift was fertilizer. In 1909, two German chemists figured out how to make plant food out of thin air. Harvests got way bigger, fewer people starved, and today about 4 billion of us are alive because of that one invention.
Antibiotics came next. Penicillin hit mass production in the 1940s. Before that, a small cut, an infected tooth, or a bad chest cold could kill you. After it, most of those things stopped killing people.
Vaccines did most of the rest. Smallpox alone killed about 300 million people in the 20th century before doctors wiped it off the planet in 1980. Polio used to paralyze kids. Measles killed millions every year. Tetanus turned a rusty nail into a death sentence. All of those got knocked down to almost nothing.
Plumbing did the quiet work. Clean water and proper sewers stopped kids from dying of diarrhea. In 1900, kids under 5 made up 30% of all American deaths. By 1999, just 1.4%.
Now the same inventions are slowing the chart down. When parents trust their kids will live, they have fewer of them. Chinese women now average 1 kid each. South Korean women: 0.7. Japan, where this tweet is from, had 1.6 million deaths last year and only 690,000 births.
The 20th century jump on that chart is what it looks like when a species finally stops losing half its kids. No species gets a second shot at it.