YoDaco

Since the 1980s, the Sahara has shrunk by roughly 8%. Satellite data show widespread greening, a pattern that is playing out across the planet. Around 50% of Earth's vegetated land has become significantly greener, an area roughly three times the size of the United States. The dominant driver is not rainfall or land use change, it is rising atmospheric CO2. Higher CO2 lets plants photosynthesize more efficiently, they lose less water, they tolerate heat and dryness better. The effect is strongest along desert margins - across the Sahel, the Middle East, Australia's interior and the southern edge of the Sahara. Rising CO2 is making the deserts, and the planet as a whole, greener.

The pig was never banned for the worm. The worm was found in London in 1835. Sit on the throne of a small kingdom in the hills of the Near East around 900 BC and you will find the pig was banned for something you could see from the palace roof. Your treasury is counted in sheep. The temple's ledgers count them by the ten thousand, and every one of them is a tax you can see walking. A sheep grows a fleece you shear every spring. A sheep gives milk, a sheep gives a lamb, and a sheep goes where the shepherd drives it, in a flock, to the altar, to the army, to the tithe barn, over the hills to the market you own. A sheep needs pasture, and pasture has an owner, and the owner answers to you. The cow is better still. The ox pulls the plough that grows the grain you tax. The cow gives milk every day and a calf every year, and a bull on the altar is the prestige of the house that offered it. Cattle need land, wide land, the kind only a great house holds, so a man with cattle is a man with a landlord, and his landlord has you. And then there is the thing in the yard behind every hovel in your kingdom. It has no wool. It gives no milk you would drink. It will not pull anything. You cannot drive it to the temple in a flock, because it will not be driven, and nobody in your army wants to march to war behind it. It needs no pasture at all. It lives on the household's peelings, the acorns in the wood, the waste behind the house, and it turns the lot into fat. A sow throws ten piglets, twice a year, and they are bacon in six months. A family with a pig behind the house has meat and lard through the winter and has asked nothing of you, your priests, your pasture or your landlords to get it. That is the problem. The pig is a democratic animal. It is the one source of meat in your kingdom that the ledger cannot see, and a man who can feed himself can afford to be rude. So you want it gone, and you cannot simply take it, because there are thousands of them and they are in every yard. You need the people to give it up themselves, gladly, and look down on the neighbours who do not. Which brings you to the second thing you can see from the roof. Down on the coast are the Philistines, the richer people, the ones with the iron and the ports, and they eat pork like Greeks. Their rubbish is a fifth pig bone. Yours is almost none. You did not plan that; the hills were always sheep and goat country. But it is a gift, because the easiest way to make a people is to tell them what they do not eat. Draw the line at the pig and every man in your hills is on your side of it and every man on the coast is on the other. Identity is cheaper than a garrison and it never mutinies. You still need a reason, because people like a reason. Do not say the pig makes a poor man independent. Say it is unclean. Say the god finds it filthy. Do not explain why the cow, which stands in its own dung and carries a tapeworm of its own, is clean; nobody will ask, because the cow belongs to their betters and they already know better things are cleaner. Write it into the law with the hoof and the cud so it sounds like zoology. Your priests will enforce it for free, because it enlarges them, and in three generations nobody will remember it was ever a decision. That is how the thing is done, and it was done again and again. In Egypt the swineherds were the one class in the country barred from every temple, and the workmen's villages behind the great building sites are knee-deep in pig bone, because the ledger never fed the men who cut the stone and the pig did. Every state that wanted its people dependent has found the same animal in the same yard and reached the same verdict. The reason the modern reader has been given is the worm. Trichinella was first seen by a medical student with a microscope at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1835, two and a half thousand years after the law was written. It is killed by cooking. Beef carries its own worm and was never banned. Goat carries brucellosis and sat on every altar. The hygiene story is a Victorian explanation bolted onto a Bronze Age tax policy, and it has lasted because it is flattering: it makes the ancient lawgiver a sanitary inspector rather than a man who had counted the sheep and could not count the pigs. From the roof it was never about what the pig carried. It was about what the pig gave, to whom, without asking you first.

🎧🎸🎵🎶🎵Volume up, please. I could listen to this all day! 🌊🌊🌊#Trump #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica 🌊

I appear to have outwitted the algorithms at X. Which, frankly, is rather like outsmarting a toaster. Normally, when I write “Trump is a…” followed by something less than flattering, the post limps along with 4,000 or 5,000 views. But this time, I announced, with all the ceremony of a royal wedding: “Ladies and gentlemen! The President of the United States 🇺🇸” And suddenly, the algorithm went absolutely nuts. 1.3 MILLION views. Presumably, the magnificent machinery at X decided this was a stirring tribute to America’s glorious leader and opened the floodgates. Unfortunately for them, as anyone who watched the video will appreciate, it was nothing of the sort. I’ve effectively persuaded Trump’s own cheerleading machine to distribute the joke to an enormous audience. Rather a splendid catch, if I may say so myself.

NEW: Trump tells CBS News he is ready to veto Democratic bills and use expansive executive powers if Democrats win Congress. He welcomed the nickname “Mr. Veto.” clashreport.com/world/articl…

‼️I need to you understand how absolutely f'ked the EU is. The EU started as a TRADE pact........it has morphed into a tyrannical government for governments. It has the power to override member's CONSTITUTIONS. Once a nation joins they PERMANENTLY transfer sovereignty in the areas covered by the treaties. (Costa v ENEL (1964)) The original EU judiciary was called "European Coal and Steel Community", used to settle trade issues .....its now called the Court of Justice of the European Union ... ... and it has given itself SUPREMECY over national constitutions and courts. It has also: - Backed Tusk’s forced takeover of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal - Imposed mandatory migrant relocation quotas and fined refusing countries. - Expanded from a trade bloc into binding foreign policy and MILITARY ambitions. - Used rule-of-law conditionality to withhold funds as a political lever. - Let their own supreme court steadily widen EU competences beyond original treaty texts. - Built a permanent regulatory superstructure (GDPR, DSA, Green Deal) that member states must enforce. This is a "trade organization" that got wildly out of control.

❗Nie tylko o Trybunał Konstytucyjny musimy się martwić. Za kilkadziesiąt godzin... Narodowy Bank Polski może zostać sparaliżowany. Tusk blokuje nowe nominacje do zarządu. Już w środę (4 listopada) upływa kadencja wiceprezesa NBP Adama Lipińskiego. Jeżeli miejsce po wiceprezesie Lipińskim nie zostanie uzupełnione to liczba członków zarządu NBP spadnie poniżej wymaganej ustawą liczby. Obecny zarząd NBP liczy minimalną przewidzianą prawem liczbę sześciu członków zarządu. Od środy może być to tylko pięć osób. Byłaby to katastrofa dla gospodarki Polski i portfeli obywateli. Wnioski prezydenta Karola Nawrockiego o powołanie nowych członków zarządu NBP czekają na wymaganą prawem kontrasygnatę premiera, a ten urząd obecnie zajmuje Tusk. I Tusk nie chce podpisać nominacji.

Meanwhile in Russia: state TV host Vladimir Solovyov predicted that Trump will withdraw the US from NATO. Head of RT Margarita Simonyan joined him in rejoicing about the unrest in Europe and complaining that the US can't force Zelensky to capitulate. youtube.com/watch?v=yP4zbemx…