Allyson

If you look at the current snow maps and storm maps available, Chris and his family, and me and my family all live within the wibbly red area (in New England) labeled “Armageddon Area.” They are measuring likely snow in feet, not inches. We are ready and prepared for the weather, and have plans in place for if power goes out. If you don’t hear from us for a few days, you know the reason why. We’ll post when we can, and give updates. You update us, too!

If you live in an area about to get hit with ice or snow, and you aren’t used to that, please be prepared. That doesn’t mean bread and milk, although those aren’t a bad idea either. It means making sure you have enough food to last through the worst of the emergency (because having to go out to get eggs or whatever is never a good idea). It means having firewood on hand to make a fire, if you have the means to do so. Have a camp stove ready to go, with extra fuel, so that you can cook if your power goes out and you’re dependent upon an electric stove. Know how you’ll keep warm, should you lose power and heat. Have something to use as a port-a-pottie if you can’t use your bathroom due to frozen pipes.

To generate heat, pick a single room and designate it “the warm room.” Everyone stays in that room unless they have to pee, and trust me, they’ll move quickly to get back to the warmth. Get every blanket, towel, woolen thing, tablecloth, and bring it to that room. Seal that room off so that the heat stays inside it. Cover windows, doors, doorways to halls, anything that might have a draft. If you lose power and must stay at home for a while, drag a mattress into that room so you can sleep there as well. If temps go into the single digits, consider setting up a cheap tent in your warm room, and sleeping inside that to conserve heat.

Ways to make safe heat:

• candles and oil lamps
• fireplaces (though they sometimes let out more heat than the give you)
• wood stoves
• indoor safe (RATED) propane heaters like Little Buddy
• hot water bottles
• hot food
• layers of clothes and blankets

Ways to kill yourself:

• use your stove, outdoor rated gas camp stove, popcorn popper, etc to make heat
• bring your generator inside the house
• leave candles and/or any flame unattended
• putting flames where they could get knocked over by a pet
• eating snow (it lowers your body temp very quickly)

You can use tea candles to cook over, if you’re desperate. Having a camp stove makes it much easier. I prefer propane to butane, because in the temps we’re expecting, the butane won’t work. It’ll fail more often than not. So be aware. You also don’t have to have the fancy folding stove like in this video for the sterno stove. I just have an old wire basket that was once used for doing deep frying, and I turn it over top of my candles. I put my pot on top of that. Voila, stove. You can also put a brick on either side of your heat, then use a baking rack. And remember, you can always go outside and cook, even when it’s cold. Snow is an insulator, so if you dig yourself a snow pit and cook in the center of it, it’ll help keep you warm and keep the breeze off your fire.

Pie crusts in the medieval era were rarely the flaky, buttery confection we are used to today. Instead, they were the ancient version of take-out food containers, only sort of edible, and designed to allow you to eat their delicious innards and then throw the crusts away. This recipe is a more edible but just as solid version of those “hot water crusts” as they were known in later periods of history.

Ingredients:

• 1.5 lbs flour
• 2 tsp salt
• 3 oz lard
• 3 oz butter/margarine
• 8 oz water

To make a standing paste crust, we’re going to ignore the sort of instructions you may be used to while attempting flaky pastry. There is a reason these crusts were sometimes called “coffins” and you’re about to discover it in person!

Add your flour (by weight, please) to a large bowl, then sprinkle the salt over it. Whisk or otherwise mix the dry ingredients well to distribute the salt as evenly as possible.

In a small pot, add the water and heat it up gently. Add in the butter or margarine, and the lard, and heat until they are all melted together. DO NOT BOIL or even simmer this mixture, if at all possible. You just want it warm enough that the ingredients can combine together.

Add the liquid ingredients to the dry ones, and then use a spoon or fork to begin mixing the dough together. You should continue using the spoon or fork until the dough has come mostly together, or it’s cool enough for you to knead by hand without burning yourself. Please be careful, and remember that the water you just poured into your flour mixture is HOT. Knead this until the dough has come completely together. It will be a very stiff dough, and that’s fine. You don’t want to over-work this dough.

If you are making a single pie, split off about 1/4 of your dough (this will be turned into a lid for your pie) and set it aside under some parchment paper or in a plastic baggie. On a Formica counter or granite dough surface, sprinkle some flour and then begin to roll out the dough. You want to have a circle of dough large enough to fill an 8″ spring-form pan, and it should be between 1/4″ and 1/8″ thick when it is ready.

To make the pie crust, you are either going to press the dough into a pie pan, or drape it over the outside of the pie pan, in order to get the shape right. Flour the pan well, regardless! While the dough is still on or in the form, refrigerate it for at least one hour. While the pie crust is chilling, roll out the lid for your pie, which should be about one inch larger in diameter than your pie pan. If you look at the pictures in the header, you can see that the crust for a standing paste pie goes inside the outer crust, not over it as you would for a flaky pie. Let the pie lid sit, sandwiched between two pieces of parchment paper, until it’s ready to be used. If it will be more than an hour, consider covering it with plastic wrap so it doesn’t dry out. Do NOT put it in the fridge.

If you are making multiple small pies (this recipe should make about 3 individual pies), separate the dough into three equal sized pieces. From each of those, remove about 1/4 of the dough for the lid of that individual pie. To form small pies, flour a glass or mini pie pan and follow the same general directions as for a large pie. Roll out the lids as well, and set aside for use after refrigeration.

When the crusts are well chilled (which allows them to be standing until they bake and become stiff), unmold them from the pie pan or whatever you’re using for a form. Put the pie crust on a parchment paper lined baking sheet (lipped, please), and add in your filling. Please note, fillings can be cooked or raw, as your cooking time will be about 90 minutes, which is enough for most meats to cook. The fillings should be cool when added to the crust, however. Hot fillings would melt the fats in the crust, making them prone to drooping, and you don’t want that! The filling needn’t be cold from the fridge, but make sure it isn’t hot, either. If you can’t stick your finger in it for 30 seconds, it’s too hot.

Once your filling is in, regardless of size of pie, whisk up an egg to use for an egg wash. Brush the edges of the lid and pie with the egg wash, then add the lid to your pie, and crimp the edges closed with your fingers, a pie crimper, or a fork. Cut a small hole in the center of the pie. This is easily achieved by using a sharp knife to cut an X in the center, then peeling back the triangles. Egg wash the entire pie and sprinkle with herbs, if you like.

If you want to decorate your pie, simply use bits of left-over crust rolled out thin to create leaves, vines, or other images. Have some fun with it! Attach them by using egg wash as a “paste”, then egg wash over the decorations as well. You could also press herbs or cracked spices into the lid, if you liked. I would suggest doing that before attaching it to the top of the pie, however.

Bake the pie in a 350°F oven for 80 to 90 minutes. Start checking your pie at the 60 minute mark, and every ten minutes thereafter. When the pie is dark brown and solid when tapped, it’s ready. See the pictures in the header for reference!

Many types of fillings can go into pies like this. In medieval times, they would add chunks of beef, goat, or chicken into standing pastes, and then cook them up. Gravy wouldn’t be added until it was time to serve the pie. The gravy was poured in the hole on the top. Later period pies of this type would have contained ground or minced meats, or mixes of meats and fish. They also had fruit pies made in these types of crusts.

In my opinion, standing paste done this way is much easier than a flaky crust, and more forgiving. It doesn’t require “blind baking” (pre-baking the crust before filling it, in order to keep the crust from being mushy) because it’s so darn solid.

Serve your pies with a side of mashed potatoes or some “bashed neeps and carrots” for an authentic meal that will fill your belly and warm your soul.

Folks, my ability to connect with the Left is becoming more and more dicey. The ones that aren’t insane are slowly creeping to the Right (which doesn’t mean they should be Conservatives, but is a relief), and then there’s the insane ones. I would like to say that the insane ones are a loud minority, but I think that’s not entirely true. I think it’s a rigid subset (Leftist women who are/were radical feminists who have been brainwashed by the media and have become radicalized jihadists for so-called Liberal values), and it’s not small. I don’t think it’s a majority, by any means, but it’s certainly the only part of the Left getting any air time.

Y’all know I’m not Christian. I was HORRIFIED at Lemon and his cohorts invading a church service. I don’t have to be Christian to know that’s a no-go. When I visit someone else’s house of worship, I follow *their* rules, not mine. If I’m unwilling to do so, I don’t go. Churches are the one place I consider to actually be a place of sanctuary. That is time-honored and long-standing, and goes far beyond the United States. Watching children cowering in the aisles, it was awful. But those folks, they were true Christians in my personal opinion, because their response to Lemon’s invasion was to pray. That part, at least, was nice to see.

I’ve been watching people on the Left go crazy in Minnesota. Blocking traffic, protesting in roadways, stopping ICE and other LEO vehicles, these things are wrong but I can at least kind of understand them. They’re “normal” protest tactics. I disagree (and for what it’s worth, I have *always* disagreed with any protest that blocks roadways, schools, LEOs, or hospitals, don’t care which side is doing it) but that’s between the protesters and the LEOs. But stopping everyday citizens and demanding papers (the protesters, not ICE who have the right to do so under many circumstances), requiring people to chant slogans (“I hate ICE!” and “I am not a Nazi!” are two I’ve seen on TikTok of late), etc… Why is this being allowed? WTF folks? That is literally what the Gestapo were doing. What ICE is doing is NOT what the Gestapo were doing. I’m aghast.

Mr. Magoo (my name for the heavy set Leftist gentleman who’s “protecting his neighborhood” with a firearm in Minneapolis) originally had my disdain because I thought he was breaking local laws (ie it’s illegal in Minneapolis to open carry a long rifle, which is what I thought he had), but turns out he’s perfectly within his rights to do what he’s doing. Therefore I’m fine with him, even if I think he looks a bit silly “protecting” his very white, very not-bothered-by-ICE neighborhood each day.

Which brings me to 2A stuff. Folks, there’s a lot of Leftists right now going out and purchasing firearms. There’s a LOT of noisy Conservatives complaining and bitching about that. I say to those Conservatives: shut the fuck up. I don’t CARE why the Leftists are finally exercising their right to keep and bear arms. They are doing so, now leave it alone. Encourage them to learn how to use their firearm safely, explain the basic rules to them, offer to take them to a range to practice on the regular. They are new 2A people. It’s none of your business WHY they are new 2A people. Doesn’t fucking matter. They think we’re nuts for the reasons we carry; we think they’re nuts for the reasons they carry. It doesn’t matter; they’re carrying. Time to step up and put your values into action. I am all for everyone carrying who wants to, and if we have new folks doing it, GREAT. At the end of this bullshit in Minnesota, they will still have their guns, and will probably continue to carry, and that makes them one step closer to being rational human beings. They’re also extremely unlikely to be vocally anti-2A while holding a handgun or rifle. The correct answer to, “I’m going to go buy a gun for protection!” is “Great, here’s the name and number of a fantastic trainer who’ll show you the ropes. Use it.”

About Charlie’s Voice: if men want women to be “real women” today, then they need to start being “real men” first. Yes, first. Because that’s LITERALLY the basics about being a man. You get to go first. Do you know when I started wearing skirts and cooking and doing home-bound stuff? When my man stood up and made it safe and comfortable for me to do so. Before that, I was working and trying to keep myself alive and healthy, and I didn’t have time to fuck around with peasant skirts and home cooked food. You want me to be a woman, then start by being a man. I’m really lucky that I have two very manly men in my life, who make it safe for me to be the woman that I am. They also support my decisions about myself, whether I want to exercise or work or stay home and write, or whatever. They make it safe for me to take the softer route, and I’m thankful for that. I was well on my way to being a hard-ass old woman, and instead, I’m a happy, healthy, productive and softer lady.

Chris and I have talked a bit about the possibility of Civil War. I’m not sure it will happen, mostly because I believe the vast majority of millennials are just too damn lazy to rise up, but also because I trust in Pres. Trump to keep things under control.

However…

I believe Tim Walz and others like him are actively attempting to start a Civil War. I don’t mean that figuratively. I don’t mean it as a metaphor. I believe he actually wants to whip up his constituents to a froth and send them out as cannon fodder against ICE, DHS, and other authorities.

Walz posted this on X on January 7th, after the Good shooting. A number of conservative friends said it was just Walz posturing, flapping his arms and making noise to stay relevant. I don’t think so. His words were exceptionally clear: “To Donald Trump and Kirsti Noem: You’ve done enough. We have soldiers in training, and prepared to be deployed, if necessary.”

If he had ordered the National Guard to stand against ICE and/or DHS (and thank the gods he did not), he would have started a Civil War. Or tried to. He would have asked Minnesota NG to face off against a Federal authority, present and following the President’s lawful orders. Ordering local authorities to stand against Federal authorities is, essentially, the definition of Civil War.

I have no idea if Walz is intelligent enough to have figured out that what he’d said was almost but not quite a declaration of war against his own country’s government. Someone in his office must have, because after that tweet, he changed his tune and was overly clear about the NG being deployed ONLY to do traffic and local law enforcement.

I hope to hell that Trump or one of his advisors called up Walz’s office and had a little chat, explaining how bad that would be for everyone and for our country. I hope that Walz and his cronies got the message. I doubt they did, though. They knocked it down one notch, so they wouldn’t get impeached or arrested, but they’re continuing their ridiculous defense of rapists and murderers.

I don’t know how to deal with the people on the Left who are making noises like ICE is horrible. I have had a handful of people I’ve known long enough to consider them “not liars” even if I think they’re uneducated and not thinking right, who are telling tales about ICE. The stories go that ICE is picking up American citizens who have their papers on them, throwing them into dark, dank, moist detention centers with no toilets, no water, no food, and no access to lawyers or telephones. They’re kept there for hours upon hours (most of the stories talk about 8 to 16 hours, but less than 24, and they’re very specific about it being less than a day), have to beg passers by to let them out to pee, and are denied health care for injuries caused by ICE. They give names of ICE agents. They detail how they were sorted into “citizens and non-citizens” early on in the process, so ICE knew they were Americans. The stories go on and on.

When I go to research it, I can’t find any of the information. The names come back empty. There’s no other people making the claims, even though in the stories there are many people being detained. It’s relatively obvious to me that they’re JUST stories, and have no basis in the truth. But of course I can’t ask for proof, because that’s a hanging offense. Even when I say, hey I’d like to get the word out but you know I only pass on things I can verify (a longstanding moral on my part, I *will not* pass along stuff without bone fides included, and have not for many, many years)… crickets.

It’s exhausting. I’m mentally wrecked most of the time now. The left gets more and more frothy, and impossible to talk to or get information out of. They don’t seem to understand the basic “boy who cried wolf” issue that’s going on. Right now, I just assume anything from the left is wrong, either a lie, an exaggeration, or whatever. I have to, because I just don’t have time to investigate *everything* that’s thrown at me. I have a job, I run a household, I have relationships to tend to and children to watch after. So if something truly bad actually happens, I’m just going to ignore it, and assume it’s the same bullshit rhetoric they’ve thrown around every other time.

And just briefly before signing off, a few words on Iran.

In the 1979 timeframe (give or take a couple of years… I was just a kid who didn’t know shit about politics at the time and I’m going on memory here), I had a friend whose family was moving to Tehran. They had planned it for quite a while. And then the regime change happened, and suddenly their entire world fell apart. They didn’t go to Tehran, and I’m glad, because I firmly believe they’d be dead. I would have been 7 or 8 when it happened. The only reason I remember that, from my very privileged place in society, was because it interfered with a friend’s travel plans.

Iran went from being a fairly modern country to being a third world shit hole in very short order. Women were not allowed to work, first, and they had to cover their hair. Then they weren’t allowed to drive. Then they couldn’t be on public transit or out and about without an adult male family member. Then they had to keep their entire bodies covered with voluminous robes. Then the full burka, covering everything but the eyes. A few years ago the Iranian government decided eyes could be too alluring, and had blackout panels put into place in the burkas, so that you couldn’t even see a woman’s eyes. In 2021 or 2022, they decreed a woman shouldn’t speak in public.

Last night, I watched a live video feed out of Tehran, of women dancing in public, wearing nothing but miniskirts and white tee shirts that said “Fuck Khomeini” on the front in large, English letters. No shoes, no head coverings, no long arms, no tights or stockings. Bare skin, hair, eyes, and minds exposed to the evening air for the first time in almost 50 years. I saw a photograph of an Iranian woman lighting a cigarette from a burning Khomeini flag. I listened to hundreds of thousands of Iranians chanting “Iran! Iran! Iran!” I am witnessing history.

This is people from ALL walks of life, which is why it’s not slowing down despite Khomeini’s attempts to murder every protester. Cutting off the internet didn’t silence them. There are young people there, risking their lives to demand freedom from oppression, REAL oppression. They risk being shot, because the authorities there are using live ammunition to “put down” the protesters. Many are being arrested, and they’re starting to shoot and hang them. They’re going to their deaths with their hands held up in signs of victory, afraid but incredibly brave. There are youngsters who were born after Khomeini took over, and who’ve never known a day of freedom, never seen a free Iran. There are middle aged people who had their childhoods viciously and violently ripped away from them. There are old people, who remember the freedom of pre Khomeini Iran, when the Shah was trying to bring the country out of the dark ages and into the light. Those old people have whispered the stories to their children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren so that they didn’t die.

When Karen from Minnesota says she is oppressed because she can’t have an abortion or because we’re enforcing our immigration laws, I point her at the women of Iran. THAT is what oppression is, and THAT is how it’s fought. With dancing. With singing. With praise. With joy. Not with temper tantrums and lies.

Well said. I felt the need to share it. Well worth watching in its entirety.

I know the term “weaponized incompetence” and have used it to describe actions of others before. But when I did, it was for stuff like the kids “not knowing” how to clean a bathroom or do the dishes, or a friend’s husband who would scream at her because he “didn’t know how to make dinner for himself” and therefore she couldn’t ever be out at dinner time.

I’ve talked about the exhaustion of dealing with Leftists… I know YOU all know that, and are likely a lot more exhausted than I am. I hadn’t realized that it was yet another iteration of weaponized incompetence, though. And that knowledge gives me ideas on how to change my interactions.

“But why…” Well Karen, do you think it’s okay for a kiddie diddler to be hanging around the playground at your kid’s school? If you say yes, then you need to be put on a 72 hour hold because you are not well. If you say no, then that’s the answer to “but why?”

But I don’t believe I’ll even bother with that much. “Are you telling me that you cannot understand why ICE is in our city, when there are thousands of social media reports on it every day? Are you really that uneducated?”

While protesting, in and of itself, is not protected by our Constitution, American do consider it to be a right. As with all things, though, there is a right and a wrong way to go about it. We’ve all seen plenty of the “bad” way of doing it on social media of late. So let me share with you the same information I shared with my children when they wanted to join a protest at school.

• First and foremost, do you care about the subject of the protest enough to put your life on the line? If the answer to that is no, then don’t go. It ends right there. While it may not be likely that you’ll be killed at a protest, it is never off the table, and you have to think of that very issue first, every single time.
• Can you clearly explain what the protest is about, what it is actually protesting, what relief you’d like to see as an outcome to the protest?  If not, educate yourself before you go back and ask that very first question again.
• Do you understand that, at a protest, you may be arrested? Being detained and/or arrested may involve bodily harm to you, and you MUST be willing to be arrested and/or detained, knowingly, before attending.
• Are you aware that you may be “group thinked” into performing actions that you didn’t intend? Any protest can easily and quickly turn into a mob, and a mob is an animal that doesn’t have single parts. It’s one big entity, and you can and likely will get sucked up into it. In order to avoid being part of a mob while being at a protest, you must always be aware of your surroundings and you must never devolve into letting someone else think for you.
• You must know that you may be ordered to stand down, detained and/or arrested, hit with non-lethal rounds (rubber bullets, beanbags, etc), sprayed with pepper spray or other chemicals, knocked down and hurt and injured, hit with icy cold water from water canons, spit on, screamed at, and dozens of other non-lethal things.
• There is always, ALWAYS the chance that someone will do something truly stupid, push the authorities too far, and someone gets shot. That someone could be you, EVEN if you are not part of the truly stupid person’s stuff. Bullets move in a path, and authorities who are rushed can and will shoot downrange. They’ll attempt not to get innocent people hurt, but it can happen. There is no protest, ever, that doesn’t include this possibility.

I support the right to protest. I support the right to publicly air grievances. I support free speech. But none of those block traffic, emergency vehicles, LEOs, or authorities. The moment you take your protest to a roadway or block non-participating people, you are breaking the law and you not only may be arrested, you SHOULD be arrested. The only time you should be on a roadway is if it has been lawfully blocked off by authorities to allow you a space to protest in (and this does happen, and it’s fine).

Do not block or impede people who are not involved in your protests. It can become violent, which is never good. More importantly, though, it makes those people angry with your protest. Protesting is supposed to be about bringing notice to an issue that needs changing, and if all your protests are doing is ricocheting around your own echo chamber, and pissing off the people who live in the vicinity, then you’ve lost. People in the area should look fondly upon you as the folks who came, made a loud noise and brought attention to something, then left the streets cleaner than they were when they arrived. THAT is the kind of protest that people pay full and positive attention to.

If all of the above is not being taught to you by the people organizing your protests, then they are not safe people. Stop, walk away. They may only be ignorant, which is dangerous… or they could be using you as cannon fodder, which is even more dangerous, for you.

Yeah, I know, we’re all tired of hearing it. But I want to throw out my two cents, as someone who was only recently liberated from the Left.

When I try to evaluate situations that are politicized (and this situation definitely has been), I attempt to re-set the incident in a non-politicized setting and see if I’m still angry/upset/whatever. So let’s look at this entire situation between ICE and Ms. Good from another angle.

Let’s pretend this was not ICE. Let’s pretend this was a random person walking on the roadway (not illegal, but some might consider it stupid). He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have a method of defending himself. Another person approaches Ms. Good at her car window and orders her out of the vehicle. She doesn’t comply (whether that’s legal when ordered by ICE or not doesn’t matter for this scenario). Instead, she backs up to leave, inadvertently aims her car at the random person walking, and then shifts into drive and hits the gas.

The end result is similar: the person walking or standing is hit. The difference is that, being unarmed, the person who was hit is actually damaged, and possibly killed. How do we know this? Well, cars weigh a lot, and when you gun an engine that way, you move fast (especially when shooting forward off an ice patch as Ms. Good was doing). Even at slow speeds, a car or van can do a ton of damage to a human body, and bumpers are placed right where kneecaps are.

In my pretend scenario, Ms. Good’s intent would only come into play for one reason: to determine the length and breadth of her punishment. The fact that she would be punished (whether it be for manslaughter, murder, or intended murder) does not change. Only the severity of it. There is no excuse on the book that allows someone in a vehicle to hit someone not in a vehicle.

Period.

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So to my understanding, Maduro stole more than one election. There’s information online about elections in 2018 and earlier, and then 2020, and again in 2024. This most recent one was won by the opposition leader, supported by Maria Machado (who couldn’t run, don’t know why, didn’t bother looking it up). Maduro ignored the win and claimed the presidency anyhow.

Sometime in Trump 1.0, we put a $15mil target on Maduro’s head. Biden’s people upped that to $25mil. Both sides of the aisle wanted this guy gone, very obviously. And why shouldn’t they? Venezuela has good oil reserves, and we’re set up to refine them. They have stuff we want, and we have stuff they need. Seems like a good connection. We also want to stop cocaine from coming to America from Venezuela, and since it seems that Maduro and his cronies were in on that, it just feels like a win all over.

Having the crazy Left standing up and protesting the capture (not murder, not assassination, not maiming, but *capture*) of a wanted fugitive that has a price on his head put there by both a Republican AND a Democratic President is just… bizarre. I don’t understand it at all. As several people have pointed out, the Left has been crying “no kings” for some time now, but when we removed an honest to goodness dictator, they get their panties in a wad.

Of course, the anger is all because “orange man bad.” It’s TDS run amok. I hate saying that, but it’s true. Most people have no idea what they’re talking about. And frankly, I’m not the idiot whisperer. I am not interested in educating most of the people who are Left of me. It’s exhausting even to talk to them. I have to prove every point and they get to “feel” I’m wrong. There’s no point.

All of this brings me to talking about socialism. I originally hail from Canada, having moved to the States some 25 years ago. I am American now. I have assimilated (with the possible exception of my continuing love of Tim Horton’s coffee and my occasional mispronunciation of “roof” lol). I now teach American history to people at living history museums. I love my chosen country, and I will defend her to my last breath.

Having grown up in Canada, however, I can tell you that socialism is not a good thing. Canada isn’t entirely socialist, but it’s very democratic (mob rule) and that’s not far from socialism on the political spectrum. The health care system is definitely socialist, and it’s dismal. The insurance is much less complex than America’s, certainly, but the CARE is horrendous. Here, insurance is a shit maze, but the care you get is phenomenal. I’ll pick door #2 every time, thank you.

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From Rebecca Harvey on Facebook:

She thought she was studying milk. What she uncovered was a conversation. In 2008 evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked routine until one pattern refused to disappear.

Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein. Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances. It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.

Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence. But Katie trusted the data. And the data pointed to a radical idea. Milk is not just nutrition. It is information. For decades biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in, growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change based on the sex of the baby? Katie kept going.

Across more than two hundred fifty mothers and over seven hundred sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger first time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. The babies who drank it grew faster. They were also more alert, more cautious, and more anxious. Milk was not only building bodies. It was shaping behavior.

Then came the discovery that changed everything.

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it. Within hours the milk changes. White blood cells increase. Macrophages multiply. Targeted antibodies appear. When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline. This was not coincidence. It was call and response. A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible to science until someone thought to listen.

As Katie surveyed existing research, she found something disturbing. There were twice as many studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition. The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species. Largely ignored. So she did something bold. She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name, Mammals Suck Milk. It attracted over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Researchers. People asking questions science had skipped. The discoveries kept coming. Milk changes by time of day. Foremilk differs from hindmilk.

Human milk contains over two hundred oligosaccharides babies cannot digest because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria. Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

In 2017 Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020 it reached a global audience through the Netflix series Babies. Today at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, Dr. Katie Hinde continues shaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health. The implications are enormous.

Milk has been evolving for more than two hundred million years. Longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nutrition is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced. Katie Hinde did not just study milk. She revealed that nourishment is intelligence. A living responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak. All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was measurement error.

Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.”
– thanks Dale McElroy

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…and to all, a good night!