Degenerative Agriculture Advisor

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

The year is 1087. The king's forester rides up to the door. The deer in the wood are the king's now, and a man caught with venison in his pot is blinded for it. Your father ate deer. You will eat oats. The year is 1217. The king's men come every third year with a block, a chisel and a mallet. Your dog's forefoot goes on the block and three claws come off at one blow, so he can never again run down a stag. The fine for a dog with his feet intact is three shillings, a month of your labour. The law never says you may not eat meat. It only takes the dog's toes. The year is 1400. The priest comes every spring. For 40 days there is no meat, no butter, no milk, no eggs, and with the year's other fasts the Church takes about 150 days of flesh off your table. It is for your soul. The bishop keeps his capons. The year is 1649. You put your cow on the common, because the grass grows for nobody. The gentlemen ride up the hill with clubs and beat her until she is not expected to live. A poor man with a cow does not need a landlord. That was the offence. The year is 1666. Parliament declares Irish cattle a common nuisance and bars them from England. The herds that fed an island for 2,000 years go for salt beef, and the island goes onto the potato. In 1847 the ships still leave Cork with butter and bacon under armed guard, past the people dying on the quay. The year is 1915. The professors come with a calculation. The pig eats food fit for people, so the pig must go. Millions are slaughtered in a season. Then there is no pork, no lard, no manure for the fields, and around 750,000 civilians starve in the winter remembered by the turnip. The year is 1940. The man at the door has a ration book. Meat is bought by the shilling, and it stays rationed until 1954, nine years after the war ends. It is for the nation. The restaurants of Mayfair were never on the book. The year is 1961. A professor is on the cover of Time. The doctor tells you the fat on your meat is clogging your arteries, and the butter must go for the oil. The study has 6 countries in it. 22 were available. The year is 1977. A Senate committee issues the country with a diet, the first government on earth to do it. Less meat and fat, more grain. The obesity line, flat for 50 years, turns upward within the decade. The year is 1992. A pyramid arrives in every classroom, 6 to 11 servings of bread at the base and the meat squeezed up near the point. The woman who drew the first draft had put the grain at 2 to 4. The Secretary's office changed it. The year is 2015. The World Health Organization puts your bacon in the same cancer category as tobacco. The spinach carries 100 times the nitrate and no label. The year is 2019. A commission funded by a billionaire publishes a diet for the planet. Red meat: 14 grams a day. Half a rasher. The members fly in to announce it. The year is 2026. The man at the door carries no chisel, no ration book, no map. He carries a carbon target. The cattle on the hill are to be culled for the climate, the farm taxed on death until it sells, and you are asked to give up meat for the good of everyone, by people who have never gone a week without it. The deer were the king's. The cow was the lord's. The fast was God's. The fat was the heart's. The planet is the latest owner of your dinner. A thousand years, and the reason has changed every century. The plate never has. Nobody has ever banned meat for the common man. They just come to the door every generation with a very good reason, and take three claws at a time.

Why is that happening? What is their occupancy rate?

In the early 1900s, a man couldn't afford proper dentures, so he made his own using melted down toothbrush handles and the teeth of a dead coyote. In 1946, a local dentist was so impressed with this ingenuity that he offered to make the man a professional set in exchange for the coyote dentures.

Downtown Minneapolis just took a MASSIVE hit... The Royal Sonesta, an upscale 360 room hotel, just sold for just $5M - a BRUTAL 93% 'discount' from its $75M purchase price in 2018 That's just ~$14K per room, down from ~$208K just 8 years ago... Here's the interesting part: The location is genuinely prime by downtown Minneapolis standards It's an upscale, 4-star property in the HEART of DT Minneapolis, steps from Nicollet Mall and connected to the city's skyway system It's genuinely WILD seeing hotels like this being sold at 90%+ discounts, even knowing what's driving these sales... What does the future hold for Minneapolis? Stay tuned and follow for more commercial real estate deals trading at massive discounts

SDPB was saddened to learn of the passing of Roger Krause, #1 fan of the Beresford Watchdogs. This past year Roger was inducted into the Watchdog Hall of Fame. We featured him in a 2023 story from SDPB's Tales from the Gridiron.

A 30-year-old John Deere planter went head-to-head with a modern Case IH, and Purdue researchers found no measurable difference in yield. So what are farmers really paying for when they upgrade? blog.tractortuesday.com/2026…

what exactly happened at the north carolina state fair

Back is Puckett, he's at the fence, he leaps up ... he caught it! Oh, what a catch! Kirby Puckett made one of the greatest defensive plays in #WorldSeries history on this date in 1991. What are some of the other all-time great defensive plays in World Series history?