DK @djohnok

Charles Goodnight bought a steer out of a bunch of five thousand because the animal already knew something the men did not. This was 1878, or thereabouts. Goodnight had noticed a small thing on the trail that nobody else had bothered to notice: cattle bed down at night and get up the next morning into exactly the same position in the herd they held the day before. They arrange themselves. Once he understood that, he understood that the herd already had a shape, and the job was to find the animal at the front of it. The one he found was a tall longhorn with horns that spread wide and a coat the cowboys called mulberry. Old Blue. Goodnight put a bell round his neck and let three thousand animals learn to follow the sound. What Blue had was not speed. It was steadiness. Longhorns on the trail are a stampede looking for an excuse: a snapped twig, a coyote, a sneeze, and four hundred tons of beef is gone over the horizon taking a cowboy or two with it. Blue declined to participate. He stood there while the herd emptied itself into the dark, and when they had run themselves into exhaustion he walked back to the point and took the panting survivors north again. He found the water. He found the grass. He found the river crossings that could be forded without drowning anything, on a route the men themselves were still learning. He did the Palo Duro to Dodge City run eight times. More than ten thousand cattle followed him up that trail, and for every single one of them it was a one-way journey. Blue always came back. At night he would not bed down with the herd he had spent the day leading. He came in and stood by the campfire with the men, where they fed him cornbread, biscuits and dried apples, because by then the crew had worked out what they were dealing with. There is one other job on his record. When Goodnight started his buffalo herd, he sent Blue out with the men to collect wild bison calves. They roped the calves, necked them tight to the steer, and turned him loose. Blue was furious about it, dragged the first one halfway across the Panhandle, then got over it and walked the animal home. They used a cow as recovery equipment for wild bison, and it worked. After the eighth drive Goodnight retired him to a grass pasture on the JA and let him get old. He made it to twenty. When he died they cut off his horns and mounted them in the ranch office, in the good spot on the wall, and they are in a museum in Canyon, Texas to this day. The whole American cattle trail, the thing every Western ever made is about, ran on a piece of technology nobody has ever put in the film. Not the rifle, not the horse, not the chuckwagon Goodnight also invented. A steer with a bell on, who knew the way. The men in the hats were following him.

We just crossed a line in medicine that humanity has been walking toward for a hundred years. For the first time, doctors can take a biopsy of your specific tumor, read its unique DNA mutations — the exact fingerprint no other cancer on earth shares — and build a custom mRNA blueprint written for one human being. Yours. It doesn't poison the cancer. It teaches your own immune system what to hunt. And this week, Phase 3 results confirmed it works. Added to the best immunotherapy we already had, this individualized cancer vaccine has been dramatically cutting the odds that high-risk melanoma comes back. In the earlier data, the combination reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49%, and the risk of the cancer spreading to distant organs by 62%, compared to the standard treatment alone. This week's Phase 3 readout confirmed the benefit holds. That is not a modest tweak. That is a different trajectory for a human life. And melanoma is just the first door. The same approach is now in trials across lung, bladder, and kidney cancers — a whole program of them, racing forward. Understand what this actually means, because it's bigger than one drug. For all of history, we fought cancer with blunt weapons. Cut it out. Burn it with radiation. Flood the whole body with chemotherapy and hope the cancer dies before the patient suffers too much. We were swinging a hammer in the dark. This is a blueprint. A weapon designed atom by atom for one person's disease, that turns their own body into the thing that finds and destroys it. We are watching medicine shift from managing cancer to hunting it. I've spent my life as a physician, and I did not expect to see this so soon. We were told personalized cancer vaccines were a thirty-year dream. They are happening right now, in real patients, with real data, in our lifetime. I don't say this lightly, and I say it as a doctor who knows exactly how rare these moments are: this is one of the most hopeful things to happen in the history of the field. I woke up thinking of the words of the morning prayer — Modeh Ani — I thank You. Gratitude, the moment you open your eyes, for a soul returned and a day given. To be alive at the exact hour when human beings learned to teach the body to cure itself feels like standing inside that prayer. We are not at the end of cancer. But we are, unmistakably, at the beginning of the end of its reign.

Underrated life advice: Become a beginner again. Join a run club. Learn the piano. Take up painting. Try woodworking. Plant a garden. Teach yourself to cook. Whatever. It slows you down. It’s a small rebellion in a world that wants you to do everything with some purpose in mind.

He is just itching to join an alliance with Russia, North Korea and China. And who knows, maybe eventually Iran.

If you had trusted the settled science of the day, here is how it would have gone. 1890s: you dose the baby with Bayer's new cough syrup, the non-addictive alternative to morphine, marketed for children. It was heroin. They named it after the German for heroic. 1900s: you rub calomel teething powder on your infant's gums. It is a mercury compound, and it leaves a generation with pink disease. Swollen, peeling hands and feet, screaming for months, and some of them died. 1910s: you cook in Crisco, launched by a soap and candle company, because cottonseed oil is modern and lard is what your mother used. The process that made it solid produced trans fat, banned outright a century later. 1920s: you drink Radithor, certified radioactive water, on prescription. Eben Byers took fourteen hundred bottles for his vitality. His jaw was removed in pieces and he was buried in a lead coffin. 1930s: a chemist dissolves a new sulfa drug in diethylene glycol, which is antifreeze. It kills 107 people, mostly children, and only then does America give the FDA power to demand safety testing. 1940s: your doctor lights a Camel in the surgery. More doctors smoke them than any other brand, and the advert runs in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which sold him the page. 1950s: DDT is sprayed over your kitchen, your garden and your children at school. The man who found its insecticidal properties has already been given a Nobel Prize. 1960s: your wife takes thalidomide for morning sickness because it is remarkably safe. More than ten thousand children are born with missing and shortened limbs. 1970s: the country puts down the butter and picks up the margarine, on the instruction of the American Heart Association. The fat everybody switched to was banned in 2015 as unsafe at any level. 1980s: the fat comes out of everything and sugar goes back in to make it edible. Obesity begins a climb it has never come off. 1990s: your father is prescribed OxyContin, because fewer than one per cent get addicted. The company later pleads guilty to criminal misbranding, and the overdose count runs into hundreds of thousands. 2000s: you take Vioxx for your knee. It is pulled in 2004, and the FDA's own safety officer estimates tens of thousands of excess heart attacks. Not one of those was fringe. Every one had a professional body, a literature and a man in a white coat standing behind it. Nobody who followed that advice was stupid. They were obedient, to the most qualified people available. Settled is a word about money. It means the questions stopped being funded, so they stopped being asked. So which of today's instructions will your grandchildren read out in disbelief. The oil washed in hexane and built into every cell you own. The statin that blocks the pathway making your hormones, to prevent one heart attack per hundred people. The injection where a third of the loss is muscle. The infant formula built out of vegetable oil. All settled. None of it funded to be otherwise.

Steve Schmidt, who ran John McCain's 2008 campaign for president, was interviewed on MSNOW. In response to a very general question regarding the Trump presidency, Mr. Schmidt spoke for two minutes and gave the most insightful and brutally honest response of what the Trump presidency has done to our great country: "Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And, I don't say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And, he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And, there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.” "When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don't use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We've never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country whose ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.” "It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And, let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are, because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk." @SteveSchmidtSES r/t Ron Tipton

Texas Rangers Lenny Randle lays down a perfect bunt so he can truck Cleveland pitcher Milt Wilcox, who threw behind him in his previous at-bat. This might be the best executed and sweetest fucking act of revenge I’ve ever seen in sports. Not many know this but it directly led to one of the most infamous riots in baseball history, 10 Cent Beer Night.

Our local classic rock station got sold and is being replaced by a Christian Contemporary station and I'm enjoying the shade in their final hour of programming before the switchover.

@sportingnews @BillBender92 Dude. Eight Men Out is #1 if kids would watch it now. Eight Men Out Field of Dreams The Natural Major League Sandlot Bad News Bears A league of their own. After those top 7, I would put Abbott & Costello’s whose on 1st before Moneyball & Bull Durham for a top 10.

I was a bricklayer. It was how I paid the bills when I first moved to America. Even the biggest title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, only paid a thousand dollars back then.  It makes me proud that in March, the winner of our Arnold Classic and our Arnold Classic UK took home more than a million dollars. He can focus on bodybuilding. But in our day, that wasn’t an option. Some guys were teachers. Some sold insurance. Franco and I laid bricks. We put an ad in the paper and sold ourselves as European craftsmen. We figured if people heard the accents, they would picture old-world masonry instead of two bodybuilders with a wheelbarrow.  It worked.  The phone rang. And then we had to go out and actually do the job, which was the part nobody could fake. Luckily, Franco knew what he was doing. The work was simple. Mix the mortar. Set the brick. Tap it level. Scrape the edge. Then do it again. And again. Nobody claps for you. There is no crowd, no music, no trophy. There is just the next brick sitting there waiting for you. You can still find some of the walls we built in Venice. That’s where my lesson today comes from. One brick doesn’t look like anything. Ten bricks don’t look like anything. A hundred bricks, you’re starting to see something, but it doesn’t impress anyone. You just keep laying bricks until the job is done. And you know what happens after four or five hours on a wall? You are so damn tired, or you feel so great that you stop measuring. You are not standing back every ten minutes asking how far from finished it is. You are covered in mortar, your hands are raw, you’re schvitzing, and you are happy. The work took the question away from you. That is the part nobody tells you about hard work: It doesn’t just build the wall. It terminates the voice that keeps asking when the wall will be done.

Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler: “Over the last 40 years, the US has been exposed to something that our biology was never intended to handle: Energy dense, highly palatable, rapidly absorbable 𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐨𝐝𝐬 that have altered our metabolism and resulted in the greatest increase in chronic disease in our history.” The food industry is poisoning us for profit and causing a massive spike in diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, and heart failure. They add chemicals, preservatives, and artificial colorings to our food in order to cut costs because under our capitalist system their sole priority is profit, not the people’s nutritional health. But why would our government allow the food industry to poison us? Because our government and both parties are bought off by the corporations making our food. This is the core problem with allowing capital to control the government. Every law, every budget, and every decision made prioritizes corporate profits over the health, safety and well-being of the people.

@athenaeumbc 1984 A Brave New World Fahrenheit 451 Animal Farm. You know. The modern books about today’s society!

These books will give you a better education than almost any school curriculum in the West today. In our academic system, you can go from Pre-K to PhD without reading a word of Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, or Milton. We set up the Athenaeum Book Club to fight back. If schools and universities won't teach the Great Books, we must form our own reading circles. These are some of the texts we've read together, or will cover soon. Join our reading group to study the great works in dialogue with others. We are just starting The Brothers Karamazov. If you've been on the fence about joining our group, now's the time. You do NOT want to miss this. We're reading Brothers K. over the next 6 weeks. The next discussion is on August 18th. Take out a paid subscription if you'd like to support us and join the discussions directly — it makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate. You'll get: - Live book club discussions (biweekly) - Access to our incredible community chat - Essays to guide you through the Great Books - All past recordings, essays, and podcasts - Ability to vote on what we read next athenaeumbooks.com/welcome See you inside!

I find that my life improves a lot when I shrink the time horizon. Instead of worrying about long-term goals, I just focus on the next hour. Do one thing that moves me forward. One closed loop. One workout. One hard conversation. One whatever. Thinking about how to build a successful life is daunting. How can you have a successful day? How can you win this hour? Do that. Then do it again. Momentum is a byproduct of movement.

33 years ago today, Robin Ventura decided to charge Nolan Ryan Big mistake. Nolan Ryan took care of him and then some. Fun fact - Nolan stayed in the game and proceeded to retire 12 of the next 13 batters

Michael Jordan says losing is not the opposite of winning, it is just another part of winning “I hate losing. It’s not even a question. But I have to respect losing…” “Because losing is a part of winning. You never just win. You’ve got to lose to win.” “Losing is going to hurt… To a point where you look at… How can I do things different? How can I change? How can I make this team better?” “Before you can look at someone else… You’ve got to look at yourself in the mirror. That’s how things get started. You’ve got to be willing to change.”

I love seeing when authors would correspond with the people who read their books. This makes me think of when Vonnegut writing to an elementary school class, and I believe it was one of his last letters are known works that he actually wrote shortly before he passed. I seldom if ever even see book signing events outside of large comic cons, or some sort of a convention and sadly a lot of of those you wind up paying to get a signature or heaven forbid take a photo with an author. It’s sad, not seeing more interaction between authors and artist, and the people who respect, revere, and anxiously away the next book, the next piece of art, or the next ballad…

#BREAKING: Talarico: “The president of the United States just said that I insulted Jesus. You wanna know what insults Jesus? Kicking the sick off their healthcare while cutting taxes for billionaires. You know what insults Jesus? Deporting the stranger and separating babies from their mothers. You know what insults Jesus? Bombing innocent school children in #Iran and sending our brave men and women off to die in another forever war. You know what insults Jesus? Covering up the #Epstein files and then refusing to prosecute a single person in them.”😳

@arkbuilder2012 @litmands @PetersMich28437 Thank you @arkbuilder2012. As someone who knows how awful that same condition is to people, Flo Jo is my fucking hero. 0 proof she took PEDs