The New American Digest

and it would be short.

originally posted by Jean on june 3, 2007

Any leave from the war was hard to get approved.
Even for him.

She trusted him completely, so when he smiled and
ordered, “Close your eyes”, she did not hesitate to
smile back and obey.

He held her hand and kissed it while he drove.
His touch was warm. She let his voice surround her,
memorizing every note and inflection to be remembered
in his letters. No thought of where they were, only of him,
there with her.

He stopped the car and turned it off.

Only quiet sounds of a breeze rustling leaves, a distant
bird or two and… was that running water?

He helped her out of the car, her eyes still closed, took both
her hands in his. Both laughing now, he walked backwards
as he led her carefully along a cushioned path.

Speckled sunlight tried to tease her eyes open, but she
successfully resisted. She concentrated hard instead on the
sounds and smells that might proffer clues to their destination.

His boot-steps were firm and evenly paced.
Confident and pleased.
When he stopped, he led her two steps forward closer to him.
He released her hands and drew her face to his.

Wrapping her arms around his back, feeling the contours
of his shoulders, she returned his breathless kiss.

Sighing, he said, “Now you can look.”
She saw his face first, his eyes crinkled in a smile.
With a light laugh he said, “Not me, silly. Look there!”

Her eyes followed his nod. Deja-vu made her gasp,
“Oh my! How did you find it?”

“As soon as you told me about your dream,” he said,
“I knew exactly where it was. I came here once, alone,
before I ever knew you.”

His arm around her shoulders, they leaned against the metal
railing. The view was magnificent; a large, sparkling creek
below burbling over rocks. Lush, heavy boughs close above
keeping the two of them in cooling shade.

His duffle was keeping the wine cool beside the spot where
they would make love.

I just deleted over 100 spam comments from the spam bucket but for some unknown reason, a couple of them were from regular readers. If one of them hadn’t been flagged for my review, I’d have not noticed when I emptied the slop bucket 9and I probably wouldn’t have emptied the bucket for a few more weeks). The installed spam filter is good but not perfect.

It could be I’ve accidentally deleted other not-spam comments in the past, so in the future, if you post a comment and it doesn’t show, please let me know. I may need to form a white list but I’d prefer to not have to do that – I’d need your email or IP address to do so … and that’s your business to provide, not mine to require.
DT

Say Hi to the folks …

Spring comes late March, just like every year.
Unless it waits until April or early May.

But the passes should be open by Memorial Day.

🙂

from a comment on “Silver Banner Mine” by ghostsniper

BREASTMILK

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 ordinary—until one pattern refused to go away.

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 depending on the sex of the baby?

Katie kept digging.

Across more than 250 mothers and over 700 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, more anxious.

Milk wasn’t just 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 surge.
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—until someone thought to listen.

As Katie reviewed existing research, she noticed something unsettling. There were twice as many scientific 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 exploded. Over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Scientists. People asking questions research had skipped.

The discoveries kept coming.

Milk changes by time of day.
Foremilk differs from hindmilk.
Human milk contains over 200 oligosaccharides babies can’t 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 Netflix’s Babies. Today, at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, she continues reshaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health.

The implications are staggering.

Milk has been evolving for more than 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nourishment is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced.

Katie Hinde didn’t 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.

posted by SK as a comment to “Harold Warp’s Pioneer Village”

Listening to Dave Stamey singing about cowboys a little while ago, and looking at this story about “soddies” got me thinking about family. My grandfather, a Scot, was for a time a rancher and a cowboy in Saskatchewan just after the turn of the last century.

I am in the process of cleaning up, sorting, eliminating and distributing the contents of what was my parents home for fifty years. Their small midwestern farm became mine a couple of years ago because no one else wanted it, or the hassle of all that’s required following the departure of old people from this world. It has been quite the project, mostly because of the thousands of books to go through. My father and mother were voracious readers.

My father collected a few things. First and foremost books, but he also liked fountain pens, letter openers, pocket watches and interesting coins. I found confederate bank notes tucked inside a book about the Civil War and old Canadian banknotes in another book. Every box and book has had to be opened. In one of my father’s medical books I found his first letter of recommendation for a job dated 1954. That was just before he left the UK, and socialised medicine, for a job as an outport doctor in Newfoundland where he had his practice on a hospital boat.

Going through drawers and boxes full of old photos, I found pictures of my cowboy grandpa. Photos I had never seen before. His winter wedding in Calgary in the early 1920s. My grandmother in her wedding dress, wrapped in buffalo robes or bear hides, in a sleigh pulled by two horses, surrounded by snow. Pictures of my cowboy grandpa in his chaps, a cowboy hat and big fur lined jacket, standing beside his horse. Those western Canadian winters were not for the faint of heart. My grandparents were tough. Just like those Nebraska homesteaders and Harold Warp, although Harold in front of the automobile in 1924 makes him and Nebraska look more prosperous. We are so spoiled today in comparison in terms of creature comforts. Maybe less so when it comes to personal freedoms.

I also found a large colored poster with my grandfather’s photo from when he signed up to “The European War, for King and Empire”, to join the 1st Canadian Contingent, British Expeditionary Force, Divisional Artillery, First Artillery Brigade. He enlisted at Netherhill, Saskatchewan in August 1914. He was nineteen years old and, at six feet six inches, very tall for his generation. He never spoke about ww1 and everyone knew it was because it was too awful.

He taught my father cowboy songs, and while ww2 was raging my grandmother taught him the then popular “Don’t Fence Me In”. My father taught the cowboy songs to me and my brothers. We know the words to many. My dad also learned to love Newfoundland fishing songs when he was on his boat…”I’se the Bye that Builds the Boat” and many others. We can all sing those too by heart.

A cowboy singer called Sagebrush Sam (real name Omar Blondahl) who was born in Wynyard, Saskatchewan to Icelandic parents stopped in Newfoundland one day in 1955 on his way to Iceland to see his father. He heard the Newfoundland folk and fishing songs. He thought they were beautiful and went on to become much more famous singing those than cowboy songs as Sagebrush Sam. I’ve put a link at the bottom to one called “The Little Blue Hen”.

As I’ve gone through this family history, stored in boxes and books, I’ve reflected on the fact that being born late mid 20th century, I am in personal touch with lives that reach back to remote times and places in the 19th century where everyday life was incredibly hard, into the war torn early 20th century, and then from the comfortable part of the 20th century well into the 21st where, with AI, our future as humans with humanoids may be very different. Seems remarkable really.

Also remarkable that my grandfathers on both sides survived active duty in two world wars but my brothers and I, by luck of birthdates and birthplaces, have never been personally threatened by war. We all learned how to handle machines and boats, fishing rods, guns and horses. We all love open spaces and own land. We all grow things and can defend ourselves. It must be something in our DNA because we’ve all taken very different paths in life. I like to think it is a strong cowboy strand.

Looking at old letters and photos, clothes and shoes, jewelry and little, personal, things that had been treasured and kept, reinforces the notion that every person is actually a whole world unto themselves and that everyone’s life, no matter how ordinary it may seem, is interesting and important. When any person dies a whole world disappears with them. When there is no one left who remembers us, and we are only names in a graveyard, there is still the DNA that carries us all forward into the future.

I’m hoping for future cowboys when I’m gone.