Survival tactic for today: Press your palms flat against a wall. Push. Five breaths. The wall holds you back. Start from there.

This newsletter survives on people who'd rather fund the truth than subsidize the silence. thistleandmoss.com/upgrade

Taken on an empty stomach, this teaspoon habit is gaining attention for how it may influence appetite signals before the first meal of the day.

The idea is simple: trigger fullness sooner, reduce cravings later, and help the body use stored fat for energy instead of storing it around the waist.

Try It Now.

Atlanta: 87°F, full sun — dogwoods spent and browning along Ponce, the air carrying that wet-towel weight three weeks early.

Detroit: 48°F, overcast — cold lake air sits on the city like a pressed hand, the Rouge running pewter.

Kansas City: 56°F, breezy — warm gusts ripping crabapple petals off the Paseo before they'd had three good days.

New York: 59°F, partly cloudy — the Hudson carrying that tin-colored mid-April light, everything Hopper-adjacent.

San Francisco: 62°F, fog — Karl crept under the Gate at dawn and stayed, muffling the foghorns into a city's muttered argument with itself.

Miami: 84°F, humid — Biscayne Bay glass-flat, the mangroves steaming in their own green quarrel with the tide.

Tha an samhradh a' teannadh dlùth — the summer draws close — and the redbud's last purple has already fallen into mud, replaced by a green so new it stings.

First time here? Welcome. thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: When a bloated grifter weaponizes tariffs during a war he stumbled into and the hypocrisy closet blows its hinges — yeah, we're talking about both.

Fifty percent. That's the tariff the bile-spouting narcissistic cesspool threatened Beijing on Sunday — pinned to unverified intelligence that China might ship air defense systems to Iran. Might. The conditional tense doing more geopolitical work than any diplomat alive.

What they said: "If we catch them doing that, they get a 50% tariff, which is a staggering amount."

The kleptocratic cabal has spent sixteen months lurching between threatening to bomb Iran to the "Stone Age" and offering ceasefire olive branches that wilt before the ink dries. A provisional ceasefire brokered April 7 collapsed when Israel struck Beirut the next day. Islamabad peace talks failed Saturday. By Sunday, this fecal-tongued administration announced a full naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world's crude transits through that water.

The damage:

Cost: American households already carry a $1,500 annual tax increase from this regime's tariff addiction. Gas prices will spike.

Escalation: China vowed "countermeasures" Tuesday. The Beijing summit teeters.

Action: Call (202) 224-3121. Demand congressional authorization. The War Powers Act exists.

Beijing buys 80% of Iran's crude exports. The same administration that can't keep a ceasefire alive for seventy-two hours wants you to believe it can manage a three-front confrontation with the world's second-largest economy. CNBC

The tariff is not a policy. It's a tantrum with a price tag.

Emperor penguins need sea ice the way a lung needs air — not preference but biological prerequisite. Between April and January, they breed on shelves attached to land. No shelf, no chick. Period.

The IUCN reclassified the emperor penguin from "Near Threatened" to "Endangered" last week, projecting population will halve by the 2080s. The Antarctic fur seal jumped two categories — "Least Concern" to "Endangered" — after a nearly 50% population crash between 1999 and 2025.

Evidence:

Krill collapse: Rising ocean temperatures drive krill deeper into colder water. At South Georgia Island, first-year pup survival has dropped so severely the breeding population is aging out.

Ice loss: Antarctica hemorrhages approximately 135 billion tons per year. A 2023 study warned the entire emperor penguin population could vanish by century's end.

"The emperor penguin's move to Endangered is a stark warning," said Martin Harper, CEO of BirdLife International.

This isn't a nature story. It's a power story wearing a nature costume, because the same fossil-fuel economy bankrolling this festering carbuncle of an administration melts the ice that holds a species together. Support the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition: asoc.org. Earth.org

The ice doesn't negotiate. It just leaves.

Bryon Noem — husband of fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, father of three — reportedly told an online dominatrix named Shy Sotomayor that he wanted to leave his wife and become a transgender woman. He chose the name Crystal. His screen name was "Chrystalballz666."

Stakes:

Policy record: As South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem banned trans girls from women's sports, restricted gender-affirming care for minors, and signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — a legalized permission slip for anti-queer discrimination.

DHS record: Trans female detainees were placed in male detention facilities under her watch. Likely unconstitutional. Definitely cruel.

The whole time — the Bible-group speeches, the CPAC stages, the machinery designed to legislate trans people into nonexistence — her husband was spending $25,000 in chat rooms, stuffing balloons under his shirt, and asking women to help him become a girl. Not metaphor. His word.

What burns isn't Bryon's desire. Desire is human. What burns is that the same administration caging trans women in men's prisons employed a woman whose own household contained the exact humanity she was paid to erase. Not irony. Cruelty with a mirror. The mirror cracked. LGBTQ Nation

You do not get to legislate someone else's body while your own household begs for the same permission you've made illegal.

The reckoning arrives not in the scandal but in what it reveals. A government criminalizing transition while the enforcer's spouse yearns for it — this is the architecture Kramer screamed about for forty years. The lie is institutional. It wears a title, a budget, a flag pin, and will sacrifice its own family to maintain the fiction that desire can be legislated out of the body.

When has a truth you carried privately cost more to protect than to speak?

Sit where you are. If your feet reach the floor, press them down. Let the ground receive you.

This is mid-April. Bealltainn approaches — the bright fire — and the land accelerates beneath us, every tendril racing toward light with an urgency the news cycle cannot touch. The wisteria bends the fence it was never meant to outgrow. Your body has read the news today, and your body is tired in a place language doesn't reach, that soft hinge between the ribs where grief and fury share a room.

Let the breath go — tha an anail a' lorg a slighe fhèin — the breath finds its own path — and for one moment, let the land's rhythm be louder than the headlines.

Spring onions → Slice thin, scatter raw over anything hot — rice, eggs, broth. The bite softens in steam. Creamhanna — wild garlic — the season's announcement: sharp, green, arriving before you looked.

Grow-your-own bypass → A windowsill pot of green onions regenerates from root scraps in water within ten days. Zero cost, zero supply chain. The light in a kitchen where something grows back from what was cut does things to a Wednesday.

15-minute asparagus scramble — asparagus, eggs, butter, lemon, salt, chili flake, bread. Snap the asparagus where it wants to break. Scramble low, fold asparagus in at the end. Am biadh a nì do bheatha — the food that makes your life.Nobody goes hungry because the week was brutal.

Stinging Nettle — Urtica dioica

Pharmacology: Inhibits prostaglandin synthesis and histamine receptors — the body's overreaction to a Georgia April. Respiratory-immune.

Use: Dried leaves, steep 7–10 minutes. Two cups daily. Cold overnight infusion pulls more minerals.

Caution: Avoid with blood thinners — nettle's vitamin K promotes clotting. Contraindicated with lithium.

Dandelion Root — Taraxacum officinale

Pharmacology: Hepatic bitter. Stimulates bile, supports Phase I liver detoxification. Digestive system.

Use: Simmer 1 tablespoon dried root, 2 cups water, 15 minutes. Before meals.

Caution: Gallstones are a hard stop — bile stimulation mobilizes stones. Avoid with fluoroquinolone antibiotics.

Passionflower — Passiflora incarnata

Pharmacology: GABAergic anxiolytic. Quiets neural chatter at 2 AM. Nervous system — stress-sleep axis.

Use: Tincture, 30–40 drops, 30 minutes before bed. Or tea — 1 teaspoon dried aerial parts, 10 minutes.

Caution: Potentiates sedatives and benzodiazepines. Avoid during pregnancy — uterine-stimulating alkaloids.

Jaw release → Unclench. Tongue on the roof of the mouth, behind the front teeth. Let the jaw fall open. Thirty seconds. The mandible stores what we will not say — every swallowed argument, every bitten scream. Tha do chorp a' cuimhneachadh — your body remembers.

The three-sentence letter → Write three sentences to someone you've lost contact with. Send it or don't. The composing is the repair. Honesty is not performance; sometimes it is three sentences on a Wednesday.

One shared meal → Invite someone to eat this week. Not formal. Sandwiches on the stoop count. Bidh biadh ga roinn a' leigheas na tha briste — food shared heals what is broken. The table is a technology older than language.

There is a fierceness that does not raise its voice. It makes dinner. It writes the letter. It presses palms against the wall and breathes. Today asked a great deal of your body — news of ice, blockades, a name whispered in a chat room that an entire apparatus was built to deny. Còmhla — together — the fierceness is not in the fist but in refusing to let go of each other's hands.

What are you protecting today that the world insists you release?

Names matter. Say them.

Larry Kramer (1935–2020) co-founded ACT UP in 1987, turning grief into the most effective direct-action health organization in American history. The Normal Heart forced a nation to look at what it had buried — over 100,000 AIDS deaths before the government spoke the word.

Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) drew Dykes to Watch Out For for twenty-five years, then cracked her family open in Fun Home, a Tony-winning musical that changed how queer women's stories reach a stage. The Bechdel Test rewired how an entire culture reads its own narratives.

Jericho Brown (b. 1976) won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for The Tradition, writing Black queer joy and terror into the same breath.

Bright Signals: Argentine soccer player Ignacio "Nacho" Lago came out this month. Students across the U.S. mark the 30th annual Day of Silence Friday — three decades of queer youth refusing invisibility.

What they share is the insistence that visibility is not a request.

What this day cost: a Strait closed, an ice shelf dissolving beneath the only species that stands upright in Antarctic wind, a name — Crystal — spoken into a chat window because the public world had made its speaking illegal. Your chest holds this. Tha fios aig an fheòil — the flesh knows — and tomorrow when the news begins again, what you carry is not the fury but the precision of having seen clearly, the way an eye adjusts to dark and finds there is still enough light to move by.

What does survival look like in your body tomorrow — not the word, but the first act?

Stand if you can. Feet on ground. Hands open.

The fifteenth of April, and the wheel turns toward Bealltainn whether the empire notices. You have read the burning and been held through the tending, and neither canceled the other — that is the point. The wisteria does not wait for permission. Gràs na talmhainn ort — the grace of the earth upon you — carry the fury and tenderness braided, the way a root carries water in dark without seeing the flower it feeds.

Bi sàbhailte, bi làidir, bi beò — be safe, be strong, be alive.

The voices woven into this work:

🌿 Poetry and Feelings: thepoetmiranda.com
🌿 Personal Queer Journey: thistleandfern.org
🌿 Life Banter: brandonellrich.substack.com
🌿 Lisa's Porch Talk: wuzzittoya.org / wuzzittoya.substack.com
🌿 Presence Not Permission: presencenotpermission.beehiiv.com

Become a member: thistleandmoss.com/upgrade