Coffee and Provocation

E.D. Morel Exposed the Killing of 10 Million People 
It's the holocaust you have never heard of, and E.D. Morel is the man that exposed it that never gets mentioned.  The killing was of 10 million Congolese by the King Leopold and the people of Belgium.  E.D. Morel was the shipping clerk that noted, in 1891, that  that the ships leaving Belgium for the Congo carried only guns, chains, ordnance and explosives, but no commercial goods, while ships arriving from the colony came back full of raw rubber and ivory. Morel correctly concluded that Belgian King Leopold II and his countrymen were engaged in a massive system of slavery, exploitation, terror, and murder for profit.

Amazon Sells Merkins
Merkins. Yes merkins. If you don't know what that is, I'll wait while you look it up. But wait; that’s not even the weird part. Check out the color options.

She's Totally Nuts
Maybe the woman was the emotional support animal for the squirrel on the airplane?  Didn't think of that did you?

Margarine Made From Whales?
Yep, this was a thing once, an artifact of the rise in petroleum leading to a whale oil surplus that did not last long.

Smells Like Dead Rabbits
Rabbits can differentiate between the poop of predators that have eaten rabbits and those that haven't.

Will Oat Milk Replace Almond Milk
Cow milk has been replaced by almond milk in this house -- fewer caloried and tastes great and is not more expensive.  Now almond milk (which uses a lot of California water) may soon be replaced by Oat Milk (Oatly),  Oats use less water, are a great rotational cover crop, and can be grown all over the US and the world.

Oysters are Restoring New York's Polluted Harbor
New York harbor used to have some 220,000 acres of oyster reefs filtering water. Killed off by overharvest and pollution they are almost all gone, but bringing them back is critical to restoring the harbor to clean water.

Will Cow-Milking Robots Keeping Small Farms in Business?
The problem with farms is labor, and the solution may be robots. Dairy farms are leading the way.

Evolution in Hyper Drive
In Mozambique, massive amounts of elephant poaching for ivory has resulted in herds of tuskless elephants as "unnatural selection" leaves the tusk-free to breed.

Forests Back Under Old Management
When John Muir came to Northern California he found an Eden than reminded him of the keeper estates that once existed in Scotland -- a sparse forest of giant trees with low cover and berry bushes below. What he did not understand, was that the landscape was not natural, but the byproduct of thousands of years of prescribed burns by native people who practiced a kind of agroforestry that encouraged the proliferation of huckleberries, acorns, salmon and elk, and medicinal herbs like wormwood, as well as willow, bear grass, and hazel for basket making. Now some native tribes are taking over the brush-choked forests left from 100 years of fire suppression in order to return to ancient, and successful, forest management practices.