#iowa — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #iowa, aggregated by home.social.
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#Butterfly #Flowers #Gardening #Iowa
This is the largest of 5 clumps of Mexican Sunflower (Tithonia) in the vegetable garden. It’s 2 plants spaced 18 inches / 46 cm apart.
Monarch butterfly added for scale (blue circle on the upper right).
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#ElectionsMatter
#VoterOutreach
#IOWA
Ankeny Iowa
Knocking on Doors for Matson for Iowa Senate
Mon Sep 7 through Tue Nov 3
7 days a week
Multiple times available
Sign up for more details.
www.mobilize.us/mobilize/eve...
Knocking on Doors for Matson f... -
China’s 7-foot-3 Zhang makes her debut at Women’s Basketball World Cup
BERLIN (AP) — China’s Zhang Ziyu had everyone looking up to her on the opening day of the…
#Football #Soccer #WorldCup2026 #AliyahBoston #Basketball #fifaworldcup #France #IAStateWire #INStateWire #indiana #iowa #KaraLawson #KikiIriafen #LiYueru #SanAntonioSpurs #sports #VictorWembanyama #wnba #wnbabasketball #WomensNationalBasketballAssociation #xu-han
https://www.europesays.com/football/58973/ -
🚨 58 DAYS TO GO!
📣 #IOWA Democrats need your help!
This is an #UnlikelyHeroes page *deliberately* featuring Dems running in RED districts to boost statewide turnout & force Republicans to defend their turf.
Donate today!
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Willowy, watery world
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Willowy, watery world
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Willowy, watery world
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Willowy, watery world
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Willowy, watery world
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Explore history of Iowa gardens at Woodward library lecture https://www.allforgardening.com/1939387/explore-history-of-iowa-gardens-at-woodward-library-lecture/ #GardeningIowa #Iowa
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I collected this thread into a slightly more cohesive Handworks 2026 blog post.
Second day at Handworks 2026 in Amana, Iowa, USA. I bought some tools yesterday from some amazingly talented makers. It is extremely hot and humid (feels like 95F/35C). But cool to see a lot of folks here for the love of the game.
(sorry for the edit notifications)
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ENERGY · Iowa task force lays out a plan to bring back nuclear power
Iowa's only nuclear plant shut down in 2020. A new task force report lays out nine steps to bring nuclear power back to the state.
Read the rest at: https://thedailyfathom.com/energy/2026-09-05/
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https://www.europesays.com/people/216136/ Ted Cruz says to elect Ashley Hinson to ‘Make Chuck Schumer Cry Again’ #AshleyHinson #ChuckSchumer #DemocraticParty(unitedStates) #DonaldTrump #Iowa #IowaDemocraticParty #JoshTurek #PoliticsOfTheUnitedStates #RepublicanParty(unitedStates) #TedCruz #UnitedStatesSenate
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Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Lord Brougham -
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Lord Brougham -
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Lord Brougham -
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Lord Brougham -
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
-- Lord Brougham -
Pacers vs. Timberwolves in Ames: Haliburton offers students free tickets https://www.rawchili.com/nba/828189/ #Basketball #Iowa #IowaState #Minnesota #MinnesotaTimberwolves #MinnesotaTimberwolves #NBA #News #preseason #TicketLottery #Timberwolves
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#Wildflowers #NativePlants #Iowa
On the #DailyWalk, this cheerful flower caught my attention. I’ve identified it as Tickseed Sunflower (Bidens aristosa). Here it’s growing in a dense patch of everybody’s favorite plant — common ragweed. The flower also has the attractive quality of producing little barbed seeds that will stick to your clothing.
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#caterpillar #NativePlants #Iowa
On the #DailyWalk, I checked out a few different Swamp Milkweed plants that I had noticed in bloom a few weeks ago.
It looks like deer have chomped the young seedpods. Definitely not good for increasing the number of plants.
On the good side, I found another monarch caterpillar.
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On the #DailyWalk, I saw several monarch butterflies -- including two mating pairs. The next generation will be heading south for sure.
This monarch was over by the pond on a horsetail (Equisetum). I think it's the "scouringrush horsetail."
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On the #DailyWalk, I spent a few minutes by the pond, where the damselflies and dragonflies cooperated for photos.
1. Damselfly (bluet) female
2. Damselfly (bluet) male
3. Eastern Amberwing Dragonfly -
Iowa AG Brenna Bird Makes Silly, Empty Legal Threats To Try And Save Larry Ellison’s Paramount Merger
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Iowa mother building garden to honor son killed in car crash https://www.allforgardening.com/1933880/iowa-mother-building-garden-to-honor-son-killed-in-car-crash/ #CarCrash #garden #GardeningIowa #HumboldtCounty #Iowa
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Iowa Master Gardener Program seeks volunteers | Daily Democrat, Fort Madison, Iowa https://www.allforgardening.com/1933825/iowa-master-gardener-program-seeks-volunteers-daily-democrat-fort-madison-iowa/ #agriculture #BotanicalSocieties #botany #BotanyOrganizations #culture #gardening #GardeningIowa #Hobbies #HorticulturalOrganizations #horticulture #Iowa #MasterGardenerProgram #OutdoorRecreation #PlantAgriculture #plants #PlantsAndHumans #PrimarySector
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Bernice Cross (1912-1996)
Bernice Cross (1912-1996) was a Black American artist and art instructor born in Iowa City, Iowa, who was based in Washington, D.C. for most of her professional career. via W #PalianSHOW -
#FootpathFriday #Flowers #Iowa #DailyWalk
Yesterday morning, I mowed the paths that cut across the hayfields. In the afternoon, I walked the same route.
It’s been 6 weeks since the hay was mowed, and the fields now have a lot of red clover and birdsfoot trefoil in blossom — along with a surprise butterfly milkweed.
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Swimming in It Until You Escape
By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — August 21, 2026, 9:30 p.m. PHT
You Don’t Smell the Water You’re Drowning In
One of the most dangerous things about a stagnant system is that it feels normal while you’re inside it. Not good. Not hopeful. Just normal.
That was Iowa.
When nothing is actively collapsing, you assume progress must be possible. You keep working. You keep waiting. You tell yourself the next raise, the next opening, the next election cycle will change something. You do not realize you are standing still because everything around you is also standing still.
It is only after you leave that the stench becomes obvious.
Stagnation Masquerading as Stability
In Iowa, life appeared stable on the surface. People went to work. Bills were paid—barely. Communities functioned. Nothing looked broken enough to demand urgent attention.
That appearance is what traps people.
Economic stagnation rarely announces itself as crisis. More often, it presents as a plateau that never ends. Wages rise just enough to be called raises. Costs rise faster. Housing deteriorates slowly. Jobs persist without evolving.
Economists describe this as low-mobility equilibrium—a condition where employment exists but advancement does not (Autor & Dorn, 2013). You are not unemployed. You are immobilized.
The Slow Drain of Energy
Living inside a stagnant system drains energy in ways that are hard to name. You are not fighting an emergency. You are enduring a grind.
Every year that looks like the last one chips away at motivation. Ambition becomes dangerous because it has nowhere to land. You learn not to hope too loudly. You lower expectations not out of pessimism, but out of self-preservation.
That psychological adjustment is rational. It is also devastating.
Studies on long-term economic insecurity show that prolonged stagnation reduces risk-taking, future planning, and cognitive bandwidth (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2013). People adapt to scarcity by narrowing their world.
Iowa rewarded that adaptation.
When Work Stops Meaning Anything
I worked. Consistently. Reliably. For years.
It did not matter.
The raises were symbolic. The promotions theoretical. The idea that effort would eventually convert into stability became harder to defend with each passing year. You start to realize that time itself has become the cost.
You are trading years of your life for maintenance, not movement.
That is when people begin to disengage—not dramatically, but quietly. They stop pushing. They stop asking. They stop imagining themselves somewhere else because imagining without means hurts too much.
The Fog You Can’t See Through
The most insidious part of stagnation is that it clouds perception. When everyone around you is stuck, stuck feels universal. You assume the problem is personal, or generational, or just “how things are now.”
This is why leaving is so disruptive.
Distance restores perspective. You suddenly see how constrained your choices were. How narrow the margins had become. How much energy was spent simply staying afloat.
Looking back, Iowa felt like being underwater without realizing you were holding your breath.
Addiction as a Pressure Valve
Stagnant systems need release valves. In Iowa, those valves were alcohol and meth.
This is not a moral judgment. It is an observation. When there is no path forward, numbing becomes one of the few available forms of relief. Substance use offers temporary escape from a reality that offers no exit.
Public health research links economic stagnation directly to increased rates of substance abuse and “deaths of despair,” particularly in rural and semi-rural regions (Case & Deaton, 2020). Iowa fits that pattern precisely.
The system does not cause addiction directly. It creates the conditions where escape—any escape—becomes attractive.
Why You Don’t Realize It Until You’re Gone
People often ask why it took so long for me to leave Iowa. The answer is simple: nothing dramatic forced the issue.
There was no eviction. No firing. No single catastrophe.
Just a slow, cumulative realization—after leaving—that I had been treading water for nearly a decade. That my life had not been moving forward. That I had mistaken endurance for progress.
You cannot diagnose stagnation accurately from inside it. The metrics you would need—comparison, mobility, opportunity—are invisible when you have nowhere to compare yourself to.
The Moment Clarity Arrives
Clarity came after I left. That is always how it happens.
Suddenly, the exhaustion made sense. The depression had context. The sense of being trapped was no longer mysterious. It had a name.
I had not failed.
I had been submerged.
Sociologists call this relative deprivation—the realization of disadvantage that emerges only through comparison (Runciman, 1966). Leaving Iowa provided that comparison.
Why Staying Is So Costly
Stagnant systems exact their toll quietly. They do not break you quickly. They wear you down slowly, stealing years without leaving obvious scars.
That is why people who escape often feel grief alongside relief. You mourn the time you cannot recover. You wonder who you might have been in a system that allowed movement.
That mourning is rational. It is the cost of clarity.
Iowa as a Category, Not an Exception
Iowa is not alone. It represents a category of American places where life is livable but not expandable. Where work exists but futures do not. Where people are told to stay patient while nothing changes.
Understanding that category matters—because people are still being encouraged to wait in places that have already stopped moving.
Waiting does not create exits.
Naming the Truth Without Softening It
Iowa taught me that you can be fully employed, socially polite, and functionally trapped at the same time.
It taught me that stagnation is hardest to detect when it is universal.
And it taught me that escape is not betrayal. It is recognition.
You cannot climb while swimming.
Eventually, you either drown—or you get out of the water.
References
Autor, D. H., & Dorn, D. (2013). The growth of low-skill service jobs and the polarization of the U.S. labor market. American Economic Review, 103(5), 1553–1597.
#addiction #AmericanClassSystem #classMobility #EconomicStagnation #Iowa #laborMarkets #Midwest #precarity #ruralEconomy
Case, A., & Deaton, A. (2020). Deaths of despair and the future of capitalism. Princeton University Press.
Mullainathan, S., & Shafir, E. (2013). Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books.
Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative deprivation and social justice. University of California Press. -
#Wildflowers #NativePlants #Prairie #Iowa
From yesterday’s #DailyWalk:
Rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium) — probably less known than its famous cousins Cup Plant and Compass Plant.
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I haven't had much for #FrogFriday this year, but on Wednesday, I spotted this one in the yard.
It just about has to be a Gray Tree Frog, but the skin doesn't seem right -- too smooth and slippery. But maybe that's because it had been hanging out in the wet grass.
Edit: It definitely could be a very young American Bullfrog (see comments). The skin definitely matches better. It may have taken advantage of a rainy night and morning to go on an adventure.
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On today’s #DailyWalk:
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#Birds #BackyardBirds #FediPajareo #Iowa
I almost forgot about #Wrensday! I think this is a juvenile. Its feathers are extra fluffy.
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#Wildflowers #NativePlants #Iowa
Another walk over to the pond. If I keep this up, I can revive the #DailyWalk hashtag.
In addition to the wildflowers by the pond and in the Hillside Prairie, I also saw frogs, damsel flies, monarch butterflies, and a great blue heron.
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#NativePlants #Wildflowers #Milkweed #Iowa
Swamp Milkweed. The low end of one hayfield doesn’t get hayed. And with no cows grazing, it gets pretty wild. Here, I’m trying to mow along a fence that’s getting lost in the vegetation. The swamp milkweed, though, doesn’t get mowed 🙂
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#Birds #BackyardBirds #FediPajareo #Iowa
For this #Wrensday: The amazing Levitating Wren!
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Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.
-- Adam Smith⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #AdamSmith #Religion #Science #Superstition
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I would prefer to lose the power of movement than that of usefulness. I would prefer death to inactivity. . . . I never tire of being useful.
-- Leonardo da Vinci -
Life need not be easy provided only that it is not empty.
-- Lise Meitner -
For #Wrensday... This is not the sharpest photo, but I like that is shows the wings. To me, a wren in flight seems to have short, stubby wings, and it has to beat the air furiously to get anywhere. But here the the wings seem long and graceful.
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Edible Garden Announces Successful Completion of Clean-Label RTD Prototype Production at Tetra Pak’s New Product Development Center https://www.allforgardening.com/1875514/edible-garden-announces-successful-completion-of-clean-label-rtd-prototype-production-at-tetra-paks-new-product-development-center-2/ #Company #ControlledEnvironmentAgriculture #EdibleGarden #garden #Iowa #manufacturing #PrairieHills #RTD #TetraPak #THECOMPANY #WebsterCity
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Time to spring into #Wrensday!
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#Birds #BackyardBirds #FediPajareo #Iowa
Happy #Wrensday! A House Wren among the beautiful, glossy green leaves (and short, cruel thorns) of an Osage Orange tree.
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Sometimes one has to say difficult things, but one ought to say them as simply as one knows how.
-- G. H. Hardy -
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
-- Henry David Thoreau -
#Birds #BackyardBirds #FediPajareo #Iowa #BlueScrolling
Tired: Wednesday
Wired: #Wrensday! -
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.
-- James Branch Cabell
