Hey Jasmine…
Black pilot here.
I think you missed the plot.
Then again, that’s becoming a pattern.
I graduated from West Point.
I went through Army flight school.
I learned to fly the AH-64 Apache.
I deployed to combat and flew 55 combat missions over Baghdad.
Nobody handed me a cockpit because of my skin color.
Nobody lowered the standards for me.
Nobody looked at me and said, “Let’s check a diversity box.”
That’s what people like you don’t seem to understand.
Suggesting that Black pilots, Black engineers, Black doctors, or Black leaders need special preferences to succeed is not empowering, it’s insulting.
I didn’t want a different standard.
I wanted the same standard.
And when you’re flying into combat, the American people don’t care what race the pilot is.
They care whether the pilot is qualified.
Merit isn’t racist.
Excellence isn’t discriminatory.
And reducing every achievement to skin color says far more about your worldview than it does about mine.
For the record.
Keynesian Brain Rot.
Wall Street’s reaction to the Friday jobs report is a tell: this is not analysis, it’s muscle‑memory Keynesianism masquerading as macro.
A solid, non‑inflationary jobs print gets spun as a problem because the Street is still hard‑wired to believe “growth is bad, wages are dangerous, the Fed must tighten.” The instinctive call for more hikes off this tape isn’t data‑driven, it’s dogma. It ignores the obvious: we are in a supply‑side expansion, not a late‑cycle demand blow‑off.
Wall St reaction is the tell. The consensus is still Keynesian and they believe a Warsh Fed will continue the Keynesian dogma. So wrong.
Trump‑era deregulation, pro‑energy policy, and the AI build‑out are textbook supply‑side impulses that raise potential output and ease real constraints. Treating that as inherently inflationary is a category error. The market reaction today is your proof that most desks never opened a supply‑side economics text; they are still running a Phillips‑curve model that died in practice years ago.
The key misread is the “response to data.” Stronger payrolls and better participation are reflexively interpreted as a monetary policy failure, rather than evidence that the productive capacity of the economy is expanding. In a Warsh framework, this is exactly what you want to see from a deregulated, innovation‑heavy economy.
In Wall Street’s framework, anything that looks like real growth must be punished. Growth is bad.
So listen carefully to today’s commentary. You’re not hearing serious macro; you’re hearing a post‑factual Street clinging to an old playbook, insisting that we still live in a demand‑managed Keynesian world while a supply‑side regime shift happens right in front of them.
His name was Roddie Edmonds.
Most people had never heard of him.
A quiet Methodist from Knoxville, Tennessee. A husband. A father. A churchgoing man who came home from World War II, raised his family, and never once bragged about what he had done.
The world almost lost his story completely.
December 1944.
The Battle of the Bulge.
Roddie Edmonds had been on the Western Front less than a week when his unit was surrounded by German forces. Thousands of American soldiers were captured during Hitler’s final major offensive.
Edmonds became one of them.
What followed was brutal.
A forced march through freezing snow.
Men collapsing from exhaustion.
Packed into rail cars with almost no food or water.
Days of starvation and cold before arriving at Stalag IX-A, a German prison camp.
As the highest-ranking American noncommissioned officer there, Edmonds was responsible for 1,292 prisoners.
Then came the order.
All Jewish soldiers were to report separately the next morning.
Everyone understood what that meant.
Separation was not administration.
It was a death sentence.
That night, Edmonds gathered his men and gave a simple instruction:
“All of you. Every American. Outside in formation tomorrow morning.”
The next day, the German commandant arrived expecting a small group.
Instead, he found 1,292 American prisoners standing shoulder to shoulder.
Furious, he shouted:
“They cannot all be Jews!”
Roddie Edmonds answered with four words that would echo across history:
“We are all Jews here.”
The commandant pulled out a pistol and pressed it against Edmonds’s forehead.
He threatened to shoot him if he did not identify the Jewish soldiers immediately.
Edmonds never moved.
Instead, he calmly reminded the officer that under the Geneva Convention, prisoners only had to give their name, rank, and serial number.
Then he said this:
“If you shoot, you’ll have to shoot all of us. And when this war is over — which it nearly is — you’ll be tried as a war criminal.”
The commandant lowered the gun.
Turned around.
And walked away.
About 200 Jewish-American soldiers were saved that morning because one man refused to divide his men into categories worth protecting and categories worth surrendering.
But Edmonds wasn’t finished.
Weeks later, the Germans ordered the prisoners onto another forced march through the snow.
Edmonds knew many would die.
So he secretly told his men to make themselves appear too sick to travel — eat dirt, grass, whatever it took.
When the Germans came, the Americans stayed behind.
Nearly all the prisoners forced onto the march died.
Edmonds’s men survived to be liberated by General Patton’s forces in March 1945.
And then?
Roddie Edmonds came home and said almost nothing about it.
No speeches.
No interviews.
No book deals.
He worked. Went to church. Raised his children.
He died in 1985.
His family knew he had been a POW.
They had no idea he had saved hundreds of lives.
The truth only resurfaced decades later after his son discovered his wartime diary and began contacting survivors whose names were written inside.
Again and again, they told the same story.
The same frozen morning.
The same pistol.
The same four words.
“We are all Jews here.”
In 2015, Yad Vashem recognized Roddie Edmonds as “Righteous Among the Nations” — the first American soldier ever to receive the honor.
And in 2026, more than 80 years after that moment in the prison yard, his son accepted the Medal of Honor on his behalf.
No battlefield charge.
No dramatic explosion.
Just moral courage.
A man staring down a loaded gun and refusing to hand over his soldiers.
One survivor later said:
“That such people can exist gives you hope for humanity.”
They do exist.
Roddie Edmonds was one of them.
The idea was brilliant. The execution was catastrophic.
Allied planners knew that the men hitting the beaches of Normandy would be cut apart without armor support in those first critical minutes. The solution was the DD tank. The Duplex Drive Sherman. A standard 33-ton Sherman tank fitted with a collapsible canvas flotation screen and two small propellers bolted to the rear. Raise the screen, drop into the water, swim to shore, lower the screen, start shooting. Tanks arriving with the first wave, ahead of the infantry, suppressing German positions before the ramps even dropped.
The concept worked perfectly in testing. The designers had one requirement: waves no higher than one foot.
On the morning of June 6th, 1944, the waves off Omaha Beach were six feet high.
Nobody stopped the launch.
At 5:40 AM, the 741st Tank Battalion began dropping their DD tanks into the English Channel, six thousand yards from shore. More than three miles of open water, in seas that were six times rougher than the tanks were designed to handle. The first tank hit the water. The canvas screen, designed to hold the weight of a Sherman afloat, was immediately overwhelmed. Waves crashed over the top. Water flooded in. The tank went down.
Then another. Then another.
The canvas screens collapsed like paper bags in the swell. Tanks that had been designed to float became 33-ton anchors the moment they hit the water. Crews inside had seconds. Some got out through the hatches. Many did not. The tanks took them straight to the bottom of the English Channel.
Some crews managed to get a radio signal out as their tank went under, warning the following units not to launch. The warnings either did not get through or came too late.
29 DD tanks were launched by the 741st Tank Battalion that morning. 27 sank before reaching the beach. The entire left flank of Omaha Beach, where the 1st Infantry Division was assaulting, had five tanks to support it. Five. Against fortified German positions housing hundreds of machine guns, 88mm guns, and mortars zeroed on every inch of that sand.
The infantry arrived first. Alone.
What happened next at Omaha Beach, the 2,400 casualties, the slaughter in the first ten minutes, the near-total destruction of Company A, is inseparable from the loss of those tanks. They were supposed to be there. They were supposed to be firing at German positions while the ramps were still closed. Instead they were on the bottom of the Channel with their crews.
The story of the 743rd Tank Battalion makes it worse.
The 743rd was assigned to the western sector of Omaha Beach. Their LCT flotilla commander looked at the sea conditions that morning, looked at the waves, and made a different decision. He refused to launch his tanks into the water. Instead he drove his LCTs directly onto the beach and dropped the ramps in the shallows. The tanks rolled off onto sand.
Nine tanks were knocked out by German fire during the assault. But they were there. They were fighting. The infantry had armor.
At Utah Beach, the sea was calmer, protected from the prevailing winds. 28 of 32 DD tanks launched there made it ashore. The infantry had support. Utah Beach cost 197 casualties. Omaha cost 2,400.
The sunken tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion still lie on the bottom of the English Channel off Omaha Beach. They have never been raised. Divers have visited them. Inside some of the wrecks, they found what they expected.
They are still there today, 82 years later, three miles off the coast of Normandy, on the bottom of the sea.
Today is June 6th.
Remember them.
She ate lunch alone for 730 days straight. What this 16-year-old built from that pain now protects millions of kids worldwide.
Seventh grade. Natalie Hampton carried her tray through a packed cafeteria and felt it — that specific, suffocating dread of not knowing where to go.
She'd already learned what happened when you approached the wrong table. The silence. The turned backs. The whispered laughter that followed you all the way to the empty table by the wall.
The one everyone could see.
The one that said: nobody wants her.
For two full years — 730 consecutive lunches — that table was hers. Alone.
The bullying went further than whispers. She was shoved into lockers. Four physical attacks in two weeks. She came home with scratches and bruises. When she finally reported it, school administrators sent her to counseling — to find out what she was doing wrong.
The isolation grew so heavy she was hospitalized for anxiety.
Then ninth grade came. A new school. And almost overnight — everything changed. Students welcomed her. She made friends within weeks. She finally knew what safe felt like.
But she couldn't stop thinking about the kids still sitting at the wall table. Right now. Today.
She remembered what she'd needed most during all those lunches. Not a teacher. Not a pamphlet. Just one person saying: "You can sit with us."
So at 16 — with zero coding experience and "a lot of enthusiasm," as she put it — Natalie built exactly that.
She called it Sit With Us.
The idea was simple and genius: students sign up as "ambassadors," keeping their table open. Other kids privately browse available tables on their phones before ever walking into the cafeteria — and show up knowing they're already welcome.
No public rejection. No moment of judgment. Just a guaranteed seat.
Within 7 days of launching: 10,000 downloads.
Then the world found her. NPR. The Washington Post. CBS News. Messages from Morocco, Australia, the Philippines, France — kids who'd been eating alone for years, finally finding a place to belong.
Sit With Us now operates in 30 countries.
"Even if it helps one person," Natalie said quietly, "it was worth building."
She turned 730 lunches of loneliness into a lifeline for millions.
That's not just survival. That's transformation.
Eighty-two years ago today, the fate of the free world turned on the courage of ordinary men asked to do the extraordinary.
On June 6, 1944, more than 156,000 Allied soldiers crossed the English Channel and stormed the beaches of Normandy — many knowing they might never return.
They came not for glory, but for something far greater: the liberation of a continent crushed under tyranny. D-Day was not simply a military operation — it was the moment the tide of history changed, purchased at an almost incomprehensible cost in blood and sacrifice.
As we mark the 82nd anniversary, we don’t simply remember a battle. We remember the men behind it — their fear, their faith, and their extraordinary willingness to give everything so that others could live free. That debt does not expire with time. It only deepens.
@Normandy@WW2Facts
#dday #normandy #dday82 #ww2 #ww2history
Pointe du Hoc, near Omaha Beach, was a German-occupied outpost of bunkers and machine gun nests.
On D-Day, American forces scaled the cliffs and captured Pointe du Hoc
@FDRLST
Imagine it’s June 5, 1776
“If America is virtuous, she will vanquish her Enemies and establish her Liberty.”
In two days time, history will never be the same.
Perhaps the most consequential two day span in independence history thus far. 🥹🥹
@LeslieMarshall@ClayTravis What "system" takes weeks to simply tabulate ballots? What "system" consistently results in candidates who are far behind on election miraculously pull out a victory weeks later? A "system" that's a complete joke.
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@dvesean Former Pgher living now in Naples FL. They trim the palm trees here every spring to minimize the amount of fronds potentially getting dislodged and wind blown during hurricane season.
Your lymphatic system has no pump.
Unlike your heart, which drives circulation automatically, your lymphatic system moves only when you do.
When you are sedentary, lymph stagnates. Metabolic waste accumulates in your tissues. Your immune cells cannot travel efficiently. Inflammation builds silently.
Here is how to move your lymph today:
1️⃣ Dry brush your skin toward your heart before your shower
2️⃣ Take 10 deep belly breaths through your nose
3️⃣ Do 20 jumping jacks or bounce on your toes for 60 seconds
Three minutes. Your lymphatic system will be draining effectively before you finish breakfast.
Imagine it’s June 3, 1776
“We have received certain intelligence that Britain is Determined to use her utmost endeavors this year to Subdue us,” you write in a letter to your wife who is back home in New Hampshire.