Jeff Bromley

Chuck Schumer refuses to rule out nuking the filibuster.

In the spring of 1940, the German army barely slept on its way into France. And the reason why is one of the strangest stories of the war. In 1938, a Berlin pharmaceutical company called Temmler started selling a new pill called Pervitin. It was methamphetamine. You could buy it over the counter. It was marketed as a pick-me-up for tired workers and housewives, and it took off fast. The German army noticed. A military physiologist named Otto Ranke tested it on medical students and found they could stay awake and keep working through exhaustion. He saw the potential right away. He also started taking it himself to get through his own long workdays. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, soldiers were already using it. A 22-year-old private named Heinrich Böll kept writing letters home asking his family to send him more. Decades later, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then came France. Between April and July 1940, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were shipped around 35 million tablets. Troops nicknamed it "tank chocolate" and "pilot salt." When the panzers punched through the Ardennes, some units kept moving for days with almost no sleep. The French had assumed nobody could get an armored force through that forest quickly. They were wrong, and France fell in about six weeks. The cost showed up soon after. Reports of heart failure, collapse, and soldiers wrecked by exhaustion once the drug wore off started reaching Berlin. The Reich's health chief pushed to restrict it, and by 1941 it was legally controlled. The army kept using it anyway. Germany wasn't alone. Britain issued around 72 million Benzedrine tablets during the war, and American bomber crews used it on long missions. Japan gave its own methamphetamine, Philopon, to pilots and factory workers grinding through endless shifts. After the surrender, huge military stockpiles leaked onto the civilian market, and Japan spent the next decade fighting one of the first national meth epidemics in the world. World War II was fought with tanks, planes, and ships. But a lot of the men running them were running on speed.

A farmer, tired of rats destroying his crops and stealing his grain, came up with a clever but cruel plan. He threw a dead pig into a deep, abandoned well. Attracted by the smell, nearly 80 rats rushed into the well to feast on the carcass. At first, everything seemed wonderful. There was more than enough food for everyone, and the rats ate until they were satisfied. But when the food was gone, they discovered something terrifying. The walls of the well were too steep to climb. They were trapped. Days passed, and hunger turned into desperation. Desperation turned into aggression. The rats that had once eaten peacefully beside one another began fighting for survival. Eventually, they began killing and eating each other. One by one, their numbers dwindled until only a single rat remained. Its eyes were bloodshot, and it had survived by consuming its own kind. Then the farmer returned, lowered a rope into the well, and rescued the last surviving rat. But he didn't save it out of kindness or compassion. The farmer knew the rat had learned to survive by hunting other rats. When he released it into his fields, it would continue killing its own kind instead of eating his grain. The farmer had turned his enemy into his greatest weapon. And that is the lesson of divide and conquer. Those who control the trap don't need to fight the battles themselves. They simply create the conditions in which others turn against one another. The rats believed their enemies were the other rats. They never realized that the true enemy was the farmer who had put them there. The greatest danger isn't always the enemy standing in front of you. Sometimes it's the one who created the conflict and stands quietly watching you destroy each other. Before you turn against your neighbor because of their political beliefs, ask yourself who benefits from keeping Americans divided. While we fight each other over Republican and Democrat, we may be overlooking those who profit from the conflict. Perhaps the real question isn't which side you're on, but who built the well—and why they want us fighting at the bottom of it.

Entire grocery stores looted and emptied out in France. But… The items in these refrigerators weren’t touched. What’s the tell you?

I don't think it was so much as making it but selling it which IMO still should be fine if it's under a certain amount say 500 gallons a year or less.

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Harvard scientists have allegedly detected radio emissions directly from an exoplanet for the first time, originating from a planet roughly 64 light-years from Earth.