This political cartoon is 22 years old

Washington needs a good power washing top to bottom. Five things I would do today to end corruption in Washington across all three branches of government: 1. Ban all stock trading. 2. Ban all participation in prediction markets. 3. Mandatory retirement at 75 years old. 4. Mandatory blind trust for individuals with a net worth more than $1 million. 5. Ban all foreign gifts to public officials, including foreign investments in their businesses or other entities.

Six good things hiding in plain sight:

This is insane if true.

In 1776 Benjamin Franklin had propaganda leaflets disguised as packets of tobacco, so they would reach the enemy's soldiers. The offer inside was a farm. Britain had hired 30,000 German troops to put down the rebellion. They were peasants' sons, mostly from Hesse-Kassel, conscripted by their prince and rented to George III at a price per head. If one was killed, the prince was paid extra. At home they owned nothing. The game in the woods belonged to the prince. The wild boar that rooted up a family's crop could not be touched. Congress read the situation at once. In August 1776 it offered any German who walked away 50 acres and full citizenship. In 1778 it raised the bid, to land and livestock, scaled by rank, up to 1,000 acres for an officer who brought his men with him. The leaflets went into the camps wrapped as tobacco. The Germans could also use their eyes. They were marching through a country where an ordinary farmer owned his land, kept a smokehouse full of pork, and answered to no lord, prince or gamekeeper. Around 5,000 of them never went home. One in six. The British Crown had paid a German prince for the use of the man. The Americans won a good many of them over by offering him livestock.

You can tell from the comments who has interacted with geese and who hasn’t.

Bingo.

Your pumpkin pie is squash pie

Amazing how much we look like bigger babies when we go. We come and and we go much the same.

The shortest driving route through all 48 contiguous US states

A few key revelations related to Gaza coverage in last few days: - Almost all of the media in Gaza were in a Hamas-run WhatsApp group that dictated and coordinated coverage. Including contributors to major western news organizations. - Al Jazeera fired 24 of their media members from Gaza for direct ties to terror groups - Admission that anyone in Gaza who reported anything contrary to Hamas claims was likely to be killed by Hamas. Almost all of the information that came out of Gaza was part of a coordinated disinformation campaign by the very people who started the war.

An amazing follow for food system people

The Dust Bowl was made by expert advice, and the advice was to plough up grazing land and grow crops on it. School files it under weather. A drought came, the wind got up, Steinbeck wrote a book. Nature did it, and nobody's name is on it. Plenty of names are on it. The southern Plains had been grassland since the ice went. Buffalo grass and blue grama, a mat of root that had sat through every drought for thousands of years with 30 million bison standing on it. Rainfall out there runs 10 to 20 inches a year. The first surveyors took one look and wrote Great American Desert across the map, meaning graze it, and leave the plough at home. John Wesley Powell, the explorer who had actually walked the ground and went on to run the US Geological Survey, told Congress as much in 1878 and again, with maps, in 1890. Congress thanked him and carried on. Then a professor at the University of Nebraska, Samuel Aughey, announced that breaking the sod released moisture and changed the climate. A land promoter called Charles Dana Wilber boiled it down in 1881 to four words: rain follows the plow. The railroads, who had several million acres of desert to sell, reprinted it by the cartload. It was what everyone wanted to hear, it came with charts, and it was science. Washington joined in. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 handed 320-acre blocks of dry grassland to anyone who would break them. In 1917 the government guaranteed wheat at over $2 a bushel and told farmers wheat would win the war. Then the tractor arrived, and a man who could turn 3 acres a day behind horses could turn 50. Between 1925 and 1930 more than 5 million acres of native grass on the southern Plains went under, in what the locals called the Great Plow-Up. The cattle came off and the wheat went in. When the wheat price collapsed at the end of the decade, farmers ploughed up more grass to make the same money from a lower price, which is the sort of decision a spreadsheet makes. The rain, having not read Professor Aughey, stopped in 1931. Wheat has the root system of a doormat. With the grass gone there was nothing holding Kansas down, and Kansas left. In May 1934 it fell on ships 300 miles out in the Atlantic. On 14 April 1935, Black Sunday, a wall of topsoil thousands of feet high rolled across the Plains and turned the afternoon into midnight. Children died of dust pneumonia behind wet sheets nailed over the windows. 100 million acres were damaged and around 2.5 million people packed up and left. That spring a soil scientist called Hugh Bennett was giving evidence to a Senate committee when the sky over Washington went brown with what had recently been Oklahoma. He got his Soil Conservation Service within weeks. Then the federal government did something your textbook skips. It bought back more than 11 million acres of the wrecked cropland, put it down to grass again, and put cattle on it. It is still there. They're called the National Grasslands, nearly 4 million acres of them, grazed under permit to this day, and they have not blown anywhere since. So America has run the experiment at full scale. Take land that only grass will hold, remove the grazing animal, and grow human food crops on it because the experts and the price say so. It took 5 years to plough and 10 to bury a region. Every few months now a report lands explaining that pasture is wasted land, and that if we only took the cattle off we could grow crops there instead. It has charts. It is science. Ask them what follows the plough this time.

A completely sensible policy

I am going to post this again. My mother contributed to $20 Obama’s campaign back in the day. I pulled her records two years ago and discovered thousands of dollars in micro donations attributed to her that have no correlation to her own financial records. I am convinced ActBlue is a MASSIVE money laundering organization and one of the primary reasons why I believe there is systemic fraud in elections. I am a loss as to what to do about it.

Japan seems awesome

wilkescenter.utah.edu/great-… U of U scientists have just released a doc on the costs and potential solutions of dust at the great salt lake.

REAL HISTORY 101 ! We need teachers like this in all High Schools and College's across the country ! WATCH 👇

In Muslim-majority countries, converts to Christianity face arrest, prosecution, and even the threat of death under apostasy or blasphemy laws. Yet in the West, Muslims enjoy the very religious freedom denied to others: they build mosques, preach Islam, convert people, pray publicly, and openly advocate for Sharia. Then, when Islam is criticized or these double standards are exposed, the response is: “Islamophobia.” You cannot demand religious freedom for Islam in the West while denying that same freedom to Christians, converts, and dissenters in Muslim countries. That is not equality. It is a blatant double standard.

RT @JessicaBRiedl: Regular reminder that, in February, CBO projected that it would take at least 30 years for the 10-year Treasury rate to…