Chip Colburn

[Jessica Berlin @berlin_bridge]

Simple policy:
As long as there is Russian terror in Europe, we should allow zero Russian tourists in Europe.

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

This is a real shame. It passed 86-11 in the Senate. Congressional inaction on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and on Putin’s crimes is a real failure. The history books will not be kind.

[Negan @Roger_Negan]

This

[The Forgotten War @ForgottenWarPic]

The man who led the Turkish Brigade into the Korean War was a general who agreed to give up rank to do it, an old Gallipoli hand who chose to go be a fighting brigade commander again rather than sit safely at the top.

Tahsin Yazıcı was already a living piece of history. Born in 1892, he had been a young officer at Gallipoli in the First World War, one of the defining battles in Turkey's national story. By 1950 he was a senior general in the Turkish army, a man who had earned the right to a comfortable, safe posting. Instead, when Turkey answered the United Nations call and sent a brigade to Korea, Yazıcı stepped down in rank to take personal command of it and go with his men to the war.

That decision put him exactly where the storm broke. In late November 1950, the massive secret Chinese offensive shattered the UN advance and sent the Eighth Army into a desperate retreat, in danger of being surrounded and destroyed. Yazıcı's Turks, held in reserve, were suddenly thrown into the very worst of it near Kunuri, given the brutal job of the rearguard, standing in the gap to cover the withdrawal of the whole American army.

Under Yazıcı, the Turkish Brigade fought one of the great rearguard actions of the war. Facing overwhelming Chinese numbers, they held their blocking positions and, when the enemy closed in, they fixed bayonets and charged, again and again, in savage hand to hand fighting. They took terrible casualties. But they held long enough, and their stand was a major reason the Eighth Army was able to pull back without being encircled and annihilated.

Yazıcı led that fight in person, an old general in his late fifties commanding from the front. The Americans decorated him for it, and he became a celebrated figure in both Turkey and Korea, the very embodiment of the ferocious reputation the Turks earned in that war. He retired from the army in 1952 and went on to serve in Turkey's parliament, living until 1971.

He is remembered as one of the fathers of the deep bond between Turkey and Korea, the Gallipoli veteran who traded his high rank for a fighting command, took his brigade halfway around the world, and stood in the gap when the whole line was breaking.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

“It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

- Dostoevsky

Solomon's Paradox is the tendency to reason more wisely about other people's problems than our own.

It's named after the biblical King Solomon — famous for his wise judgments, but who in his later years is depicted as making increasingly poor choices in his own personal and political life.

The term was introduced in 2014 by psychologists Igor Grossmann and Ethan Kross. In their studies on relationship conflicts, they found that people were better at taking multiple viewpoints into account, acknowledging what they didn't know, and looking for compromise when they were thinking about someone else's problem instead of their own.

They also found a way to counteract it: self-distancing. If you look at your own situation as an outside observer would, or ask yourself, "What would I tell a friend to do if they were in this exact position?" it becomes easier to think more clearly and objectively.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Harry Truman left the White House as one of the least popular presidents of his era. He returned home without a presidential pension, without a government-funded staff, and without much public appreciation for the choices he had made. Yet more than a decade later, another president would travel to his hometown to place tangible proof in his hands that one of his greatest defeats had never truly been a defeat at all.

On January 20, 1953, Truman’s presidency came to an end.

Unlike former presidents today, he had no taxpayer-funded office waiting for him. No lifetime salary. No official support system. The Former Presidents Act, which would later provide those benefits, had not yet been created.

His most reliable income came from his World War I military pension.

It was a little over one hundred dollars a month.

So Harry and Bess Truman boarded a train, left Washington behind, and returned to Independence, Missouri.

At the time, few Americans seemed upset to see him go.

His approval ratings had collapsed. Critics blamed him for inflation, political scandals, the Korean War, and much of the uncertainty that followed World War II. Newspapers had spent years portraying him as ineffective, and many voters believed his legacy had already been written.

In the eyes of much of the country, Harry Truman was a failed president.

Truman never spent much energy arguing otherwise.

Instead, he settled back into ordinary life.

That same year, he bought a Chrysler and took a road trip with Bess across the country. They drove through multiple states without a motorcade or special treatment. Truman stopped at gas stations and filled the tank himself.

People recognized him.

Truck drivers waved.

Strangers asked for autographs.

Once, state police reportedly pulled him over because he was driving too slowly.

Back home in Independence, he answered his own phone, handled his own mail, and took daily walks through town. Reporters who tried to follow him sometimes struggled to match his pace.

The former president had become, in many ways, a private citizen again.

What stood out most was what he refused to do.

He did not spend his retirement attacking Dwight Eisenhower.

He did not launch a campaign to repair his image.

He did not obsess over his place in history.

He simply moved forward with his life.

Meanwhile, history quietly began revisiting the decisions he had made.

One of those decisions came in 1948 when Truman signed Executive Order 9981, beginning the desegregation of the U.S. military.

It was a politically risky move.

Military leaders objected. Southern Democrats were furious. Many advisers warned him against it.

Truman proceeded anyway.

He believed segregation was morally wrong, and once he reached that conclusion, political calculations no longer mattered much to him.

Then there was Europe.

The continent emerged from World War II shattered. Economies were broken, cities lay in ruins, and millions faced poverty and instability.

Truman’s administration responded with policies that would shape the modern world.

The Truman Doctrine committed America to resisting Soviet expansion.

The Marshall Plan invested billions in rebuilding Western Europe.

At the time, many critics called it wasteful spending.

Years later, those same decisions looked very different.

European economies recovered. Democracies survived. Western Europe entered one of the most stable and prosperous periods in its history.

Policies once mocked as expensive mistakes increasingly appeared to be the foundation of the postwar order.

Yet one issue remained painfully unresolved.

National health insurance.

In 1945, only months after World War II ended, Truman became the first American president to formally ask Congress for a comprehensive national health insurance program.

He believed illness should not destroy a family financially.

The opposition was immediate and intense.

The American Medical Association denounced the proposal. Conservatives attacked it. Many lawmakers from both parties joined forces to stop it.

The legislation died.

Truman tried again.

It failed again.

When he left office in 1953, one of the causes he cared about most remained unfinished.

There would be no celebration.

No signing ceremony.

No victory.

So Truman returned to Missouri and carried on with his life.

Then, twenty years after he first began the fight, something remarkable happened.

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid.

Johnson could have held the ceremony at the White House.

Instead, he boarded Air Force One and flew to Independence, Missouri.

The signing took place inside the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library.

Waiting there was an 81-year-old former president whose vision had once been dismissed and defeated.

Before signing the bill, Johnson publicly praised Truman for championing the cause long before the nation was ready to embrace it.

Then he signed the legislation.

Medicare and Medicaid became law.

Johnson handed several of the signing pens to Harry and Bess Truman.

In front of the country, he made something clear:

The man who had lost the battle in the 1940s had helped make victory possible in the 1960s.

But Johnson had one more tribute planned.

Six months later, he returned to the Truman Library carrying two small cards.

They were among the first Medicare cards ever issued.

Card number one belonged to Harry S. Truman.

Card number two belonged to Bess Truman.

Johnson presented them personally.

The symbolism was impossible to miss.

The president who had left Washington believing one of his most important goals had failed now held proof that the idea had survived long enough to become reality.

The cause had outlived the defeat.

Truman died in 1972 at the age of eighty-eight.

By then, historians had already begun reevaluating his presidency.

The Marshall Plan.

The Truman Doctrine.

The integration of the armed forces.

The recognition of Israel.

The creation of NATO.

The strategy of containing Soviet expansion without triggering another world war.

And the early push for national health insurance.

Decisions that once drew criticism increasingly looked like acts of long-term leadership.

The president who left office with approval ratings near thirty percent gradually rose in historical rankings until he became widely regarded as one of the most consequential presidents of the twentieth century.

What makes that transformation remarkable is that Truman did almost nothing to create it.

He did not reinvent himself.

He did not rewrite history.

He did not spend decades demanding recognition.

He returned home, lived quietly, and let time deliver its verdict.

Some victories happen on election night.

Some arrive when a bill becomes law.

And some take decades before the world realizes the people who appeared to lose were simply ahead of their time.

Harry Truman lived long enough to see one of those victories placed directly into his hands.

History is patient.

Sometimes it takes years for the world to catch up to the people who were right.

[Untold War Stories @UntoldWarFacts]

By the end of the war one British engine was powering the Spitfire, the Hurricane, the Lancaster, the Mosquito and the American Mustang.

Rolls Royce could not build anywhere near enough of them, so the British government asked a car company for help.

The car company studied the drawings and came back with a problem.

Rolls-Royce's tolerances were too loose.

This is the story of the Merlin..🧵1/4

[Untold War Stories @UntoldWarFacts]

🧵 4/4

Britain needed more still, so in September 1940 Rolls-Royce signed a licence with the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, on an order worth 130 million dollars.

Packard hit the same problem Ford had. Before mass production could begin, they had to convert and extensively redraw Rolls-Royce's manufacturing drawings for American standards and methods. Jesse Vincent put more than 200 engineers and draughtsmen on the job. The first Packard Merlin ran on 2 August 1941.

Packard alone went on to build roughly 55,000 Merlins.

And that turned out to matter more than anyone expected. The P-51 Mustang was very good at low level with its original American engine and badly limited high up, where the bombers were. Rolls-Royce tried a Merlin in one in 1942, and the aircraft became something else entirely. The escort fighter that could take American bombers to Berlin and bring them home again.

The Merlins that powered the great American P-51 escort force were not built in Derby. They were Packard built versions, made in Detroit.

A British engine, mass produced by people who made cars, in an aircraft designed in California, flown by American pilots over Germany.

This was the story of the Merlin.

I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.

[The Rocket Media @TheRocketMediaX]

His parents named him Antariksh. In Sanskrit, it means space. He grew up, watched someone close to him spend six hours in a cancer ward connected to a drug drip, and spent the next phase of his life figuring out why that infusion could not be shorter. The answer was gravity. The answer to gravity was orbit.

Keytruda, one of the most powerful cancer immunotherapies in the world, takes five to six hours to enter the bloodstream because the drug molecule is too large and unstable to inject quickly. It is large because Earth's gravity creates defects when the crystal forms, limiting how concentrated and uniform the final drug can be. Merck, in a collaboration with NASA, grew a higher-quality, easier-to-inject version of the same molecule on the International Space Station, where there is no gravity to interfere. The infusion that could be shorter already exists. It just has to be made in orbit.

Antariksh Parichha read roughly 300 papers. Then he started a company.

Serendipity Space was founded in 2024 in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, alongside Jivitesh Debata and Dr. Monica Ekal, who brings research experience from Germany's DLR and NASA. They call themselves a pharma company that goes to space, not a space company doing pharma. The distinction is intentional and precise.

In March 2026, the team flew Alchemy, their autonomous pharmaceutical factory, on a stratospheric balloon in partnership with TIFR's Balloon Facility in Hyderabad. The system executed drug crystallization processes in near-space conditions, preserved the crystals through re-entry, and the payload was recovered intact. The first experiment of its kind conducted in India. The balloon is not orbit and near-space is not true microgravity, but the hardware worked, the avionics worked, and the recovery capsule worked. What flew over Hyderabad was proof that Alchemy survives the journey to where it needs to go.

"On Earth, gravity disrupts crystallisation, creating defects that reduce solubility and effectiveness. In microgravity, these constraints disappear," Parichha said.

From pre-seed funding in July 2025 to near-space demonstration took less than twelve months.

Somewhere in India tonight, a cancer patient is connected to a six-hour infusion. The molecule inside it was already made better in space nine years ago. Antariksh Parichha is building the factory that makes it that way at scale.

His parents chose the right name.

[scha·den·freu·de  @BlisterPearl]

Antifa is a philosophy, not an organization. But if it had headquarters, it'd be Arlington National cemetery.
There are 400K anti-fascists there.

[Jim Koenigsberger @Jimfrombaseball]

"On a Feb. 16, 1953 mission, Ted Williams’ plane took heavy hits.
He was streaming smoke and fire from the engine, which in a Panther usually signalled an explosion that would blow the tail off.
Williams bellied in at 150 mph or more, slid up the runway for 2000 feet, came to a stop, jumped out of the cockpit, off the wing, ran until he was out of danger, turned around and stood there watching the plane burn on the runway."
John Glenn at K3, Korea.
"Ted Williams flew as my wingman, on about half the missions he flew in Korea. During his crash, he was on fire and had to belly land the plane back in.
He slid it in on the belly.
It came up the runway about 1,500 feet before he was able to jump out and run off the wingtip.
Much as I appreciate baseball, Ted to me, will always be a Marine fighter pilot."
John Glenn.
"I liked flying.
It was the second-best thing that ever happened to me.
If I hadn’t had baseball to come back to, I might have gone on as a Marine pilot."
Ted Williams.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

There is a good chance you have read this man's words hundreds of times without ever knowing his name. Every license plate in the state of New Hampshire carries them: "Live Free or Die." An old soldier named John Stark wrote that line, and his own story is even better than his motto.

Stark was a frontiersman before he was a general, a tough New Hampshire woodsman who had been captured by the Abenaki as a young man and had ranged the wilderness with the elite Rogers' Rangers in the French and Indian War. He knew how to fight in the real world, not the parade ground, and when the Revolution came he brought that hard practicality to the American cause.

At Bunker Hill in 1775, it was Stark and his New Hampshire men who held the most vulnerable spot on the American line, the far left flank down by the beach, where the British planned to sweep around and roll up the whole position. Stark saw the danger, threw up a makeshift barrier of fence rails and stone, and posted his marksmen behind it. When the British came along the shore, his men shot them down in rows. That flank never broke. It was one of the coolest, deadliest pieces of work on that bloody hill.

But his masterpiece came in 1777. By then Stark had actually quit the Continental Army in disgust after being passed over for promotion, proud and stubborn to the bone. New Hampshire, threatened by Burgoyne's invading British army pushing down from Canada, gave him an independent militia command, and Stark raised a force of farmers and neighbors. When a detachment of Burgoyne's army, Germans and Loyalists, marched toward Bennington to seize American supplies, Stark went out to meet them.

Before the battle he is said to have pointed at the enemy and delivered one of the great war cries in American history: "There are the redcoats, and they are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!" Molly was his wife. Then he attacked, and his militia overwhelmed the enemy force almost completely, killing or capturing nearly the whole detachment. Bennington was a disaster for Burgoyne. It stripped away hundreds of his men and much of his supplies and helped set up his doom at Saratoga a few weeks later, the victory that brought France into the war. The stubborn militia general had struck one of the decisive blows of the Revolution.

Stark lived a very long life, one of the last surviving generals of the war, honored but increasingly frail. And in 1809, when the aging veterans of Bennington invited him to a reunion, he was too sick to travel. So he sent them a toast instead, written on paper, to be read aloud in his absence. It said: "Live free or die. Death is not the worst of evils."

He meant it as a plain old soldier's creed, the hard-won wisdom of a man who had seen enough of the world to know that there are things worse than dying, and that living without freedom was one of them. More than a century later, in 1945, New Hampshire made those four words its official state motto. And so today the phrase rides on every plate on every car in the state, a frontier general's defiant toast, outliving him by two hundred years.

Remember John Stark. Not just four famous words, but the flinty old ranger who earned the right to say them, held the line at Bunker Hill, crushed the enemy at Bennington, and spent a long life proving that he lived exactly the way he told the rest of us to.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When Dolly Parton received her first substantial royalty payments in Nashville, she didn’t spend them on fame or luxury. Instead, she used the money to give her parents something they had never truly known: comfort.

Her rise through hit records and regular appearances on The Porter Wagoner Show finally brought financial stability. Growing up, Dolly had watched her parents, Robert and Avie Lee Parton, struggle to raise 12 children in a tiny cabin tucked into the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. The home had no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and little protection from the harsh winter cold.

Once success arrived, Parton bought her parents a sturdy brick house on level ground, far from the hardships of the old cabin. For the first time, they had modern conveniences—indoor heating, running water, and a proper bathroom. She also fulfilled a promise she had carried since childhood by buying her father a brand-new truck, replacing years of getting by without reliable transportation.

For her mother, the change was especially emotional. Avie Lee had spent years washing clothes for a large family in cold river water and preparing meals over a wood-burning stove. Standing in her new kitchen, she was overwhelmed when she turned on a faucet and hot water flowed instantly from the tap. It was a simple moment, but one that represented a lifetime of struggle finally coming to an end.

The gift meant more than a new house. It eased the burden Robert had long carried from years of poverty and sacrifice. Through her early television contracts and music success, Dolly Parton didn’t just transform her own future—she changed the future of the family that helped shape her.

[Kimberly 🏕️ 🐶🎗️🎀 @KimberlySuth]

@RadioFreeTom How did we get to a place that American military leadership can’t discern comic books from history books?

[🇺🇸𝗢𝗹𝗱 𝗦𝘂𝗯𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗿⚓️ @USN_Submariner]

To hell, by compass
OTD in 1920, the following exchange took place between freighter S.S. Alanthus & what appeared to be a buoy waving a white flag, as seen in the photo:
• Alanthus: What ship are you?
• Submarine S-5
• Alanthus: What nationality
• United States
• Alanthus: Where are you bound
• To hell, by compass
A day earlier, S-class submarine USS S-5 (SS-110) attempted to quickly dive during a drill, but forgot to close the induction valve. Water poured into the forward compartment, forcing the crew to abandon it. They blew the main tank but quickly sank to the ocean floor 180 feet below the surface. From there they blew the aft tanks & the stern rose at a 60-degree angle with the bow still on the seabed. Struggling to stand & running out of air, the crew began using hand tools to drill through the hull at the stern. Progress was extremely slow, but they finally created a hole after 16 hours of drilling to deploy a flag made from a copper pipe & a white t-shirt. Luckily Alanthus spotted them &, after having the above exchange, worked to drill a larger escape hole. All 40 crew members survived.

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When she was just ten years old, Nawal El Saadawi sabotaged her own arranged engagement in a way no one expected.

Her family had selected a future husband for her, but Nawal had already decided that no one else would determine her destiny. Before the groom’s family arrived, she chewed raw eggplant until her teeth turned black. Then she greeted the visitors with a broad smile.

The reaction was immediate. Shocked by her appearance, the prospective groom and his family left, and the engagement was called off.

It was her first act of rebellion—and her first victory.

Born in 1931 in the Egyptian village of Kafr Tahla, Nawal was the second of nine children. From an early age, she witnessed the harsh realities faced by girls. Her grandmother often reminded her that society valued boys far more than girls.

At six years old, she endured female genital mutilation at the hands of women in her own family. The physical pain faded with time, but the emotional wound never truly healed. It opened her eyes to how deeply tradition could be used to control women.

Rather than accept that reality, she chose to challenge it.

Encouraged by a father who believed education should belong to daughters as much as sons, Nawal developed a passion for reading and writing. By thirteen, she had already written her first novel. She later graduated from Cairo University with a medical degree in 1955.

Working as a physician in rural communities exposed her to the suffering of countless women. She treated patients harmed by poverty, abuse, dangerous customs, and unequal access to healthcare. Over time, she came to believe that many of these problems could not be solved by medicine alone.

The illness, she argued, was rooted in inequality itself.

In 1969, she published Women and Sex, a bold book that confronted issues many considered untouchable, including female genital mutilation and the policing of women’s bodies.

The consequences were swift.

Authorities removed her from her position as Director of Public Health, shut down the publication she edited, and banned her writings. Yet the pressure only strengthened her resolve.

As she later remarked, those in power believed they could silence her by taking away her job, but activism had become inseparable from her life.

During her work as a prison psychiatrist, she met a woman awaiting execution after killing the man who exploited her. That encounter inspired Woman at Point Zero, a novel that would become one of the most influential works in Arab feminist literature.

In 1981, President Anwar Sadat ordered her arrest as part of a broader crackdown on critics and activists. At the age of fifty, Nawal found herself imprisoned in Qanatir Women’s Prison.

Denied access to pens and paper, she refused to stop writing. A fellow inmate secretly provided her with an eyebrow pencil, while scraps of toilet paper became her notebook.

On those makeshift pages, she recorded the experiences that would later form her prison memoirs.

She understood something her captors did not: confiscating a writer’s tools is not the same as silencing a writer’s voice.

Even while incarcerated, she continued organizing and advocating for women’s rights, helping lay the foundations for what would become the Arab Women Solidarity Association.

After Sadat’s assassination later that year, she was released. For the next four decades, she remained one of the Arab world��s most outspoken intellectuals, challenging authoritarianism, gender-based violence, and social injustice wherever she encountered them.

Until her death in 2021, Nawal El Saadawi never stopped speaking uncomfortable truths.

Her life demonstrated that revolutions often begin long before they reach governments or institutions. Sometimes they begin with a child refusing an arranged future. Sometimes they begin with words written in secret on scraps of paper. Sometimes they begin with one person deciding that fear will no longer dictate their choices.

From a small village in Egypt to prison cells, lecture halls, and international stages, Nawal spent her life refusing to surrender her independence.

Her legacy endures as a reminder that courage is not always loud. Sometimes it is a ten-year-old girl smiling with blackened teeth, determined to choose her own path. Sometimes it is a writer armed with nothing more than an eyebrow pencil, refusing to let her voice be erased. And sometimes it is a woman who spends an entire lifetime proving that ideas can outlast prisons, censorship, and every attempt to suppress them.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

We are SEVERELY fucking underreacting to what’s happening in our government right now.

[Congressman Eugene Vindman @RepVindman]

I sold my individual stocks before taking office and I paid the capital gains taxes that were due. I believe that if you are unwilling to put the public interest ahead of personal profit, you should not be serving in public office.

That’s why I’m introducing legislation that requires public officials to sell their stocks or step down.

[julie k. brown @jkbjournalist]

😭😭😭One of the first memberships I bought when my kids were little was for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. We would spend countless hours digging for dinosaur bones and learning about science, history and nature. I credit the Academy with influencing my daughter to go into a science-related career. Today she is a vet. She called me yesterday upon hearing this news and said, "Mom, let's go one last time." 😭I pray that they find a way to keep this beloved institution open -- and I encourage families to consider joining as a member. It was worth every penny.

[Marko Mihkelson 🇪🇪🇺🇦🇪🇺 @markomihkelson]

Germany and other European countries that have not done so yet - let’s stop issuing Schengen tourist visas to Russian citizens.

The Baltic states did this back in 2022.

German authorities have identified suspects in the Leipzig drone attack, including a Belarusian national with a Russian passport who entered the Schengen area on an Italian tourist visa issued in Minsk in late April.