Coffee and Provocation

Death Wish Coffee
Death Wish Coffee, which claims to make the strongest coffee in the world, is pulling all cans of its 11-ounce Nitro Cold Brew because of the slight risk of botulism.

Roadless Forest Protection Is Protected
I worked on roadless forest protection for a couple of years. When I went to the signing of the bill in 2001 at the National Arboretum, in a snow storm, with Bill Clinton doing the honors (and introduced by Gaylord Nelson) I thought it was secure. Nope. The good news is that this week a Washington, D.C. district court rejected Alaska’s latest attempt to scrap the 16-year-old rule which protects over 50 million acres of wild national forest in 37 states.

The AKC's Reefer Madness
The AKC Canine Health Foundation is funding a clinical trial to study the use of marijuana (aka "cannabidiol") to treat epilepsy in dogs. What the AKC Canine Health Foundation is NOT doing is leading the charge to end the AKC's embrace of closed registries and the inbreeding which actually results in the doubling down of recessive genes that cause epilepsy.

Fordlandia
In 1928, Henry Ford decided to grow his own rubber trees in South America. To that end, he secured 10,000 square kilometers of land in Brazil's Amazon rainforest, and shipped in a team of managers and their families with everything they needed to build a complete American town. "Fordlândia" was an idealized pre-Jazz age midwestern town in the jungle which lasted about 6 years before falling apart. Pictures then, and now, available here.

Firestone and the Warlord Cannibal
Forlandia (see above) was only one massive American rubber plantation. In 1926, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company opened a massive rubber plantations in Harbel, Liberia, West Africa, spanning more than 1 million acres. Firestone ran the plantation as a country within a country until the outbreak of the First Liberian Civil War in September 1990 when psychopathic rebel leader and cannibal Charles Taylor seized the Harbel plantation. From 1992 to 2003, the plantation was more or less not in operation, but in 2003, at the conclusion of the Second Liberian Civil War, Firestone invested over $100 million in restoring and rebuilding its Liberian facilities.

The Police State Which Ruins Lives
Over 653,000 people were arrested in the US last year for simple marijuana possession despite the fact that marijuana is a substance that is objectively safer than alcohol.

Life Deep Beneath Our Feet

Swedes searching for a nuclear waste storage site stumbled on a pocket of fungus 2,500 feet underground that may reveal a huge hidden reservoir of life deep beneath our feet.

This Fanny Pack Is the Best
Perfect for someone.

Killing Rats Brings Life
The nesting calls of Storm Petrels have been recorded on the Shiant Islands in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland for the first time in decades thanks to an aggressive campaign of rat extermination.

Barbed Wire Telephones
Barbed wire was invented in 1873 in the U.S. and for a time was occasionally used as a rural telephone line, connecting western homesteads together over as many as 20 farms.