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David Hartmann
@DavidHartmann
It may not help US to hear your story. But, it may help YOU to tell it.
Illinois
Joined October 2009
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A good rule of thumb: When critics—Right or Left—try to silence your speech, debate, or writings, 1. Laugh, and 2. Tell them to go play in the street. In Western Democracies NO ONE has a right to shut you up. Forget that at your peril. And fight. #FreeSpeech #Fascism #AntiFascism
Two poli-sci professors faced censure for participation on a panel about mass migration & its effect on identity in the West. Instead of dropping out, they actually tested their detractors’ ridiculous claims & accusations through surveys. https://t.co/4mcfcYrPoS
"We don't hate anybody."
"Well you should. Makes life more fun."
Truly the French spirit.
The Peace of Westphalia of 1648, recreated in a comedy sketch from the BBC program The Nearly Complete and Utter History of Everything (1999).
Whoever this officer is, send him to France NOW.
Insults were so much better in the 18th Century.
An alleged exchange between First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich, and the radical politician John Wilkes.
Sandwich: “Sir, you will either die on the gallows, or of the pox.”
Wilkes: “That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress’.”
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Family Guy recently made a Civil War version of "Who's on First" that had me crying laughing. It had no business being that good.
Maye Musk, Elon's mother, visited the Tesla Fremont factory during the Model 3 production crisis and found her son sleeping on the factory floor. She described the scene: the CEO of a public company lying on a thin mattress under a desk next to an assembly line, surrounded by the noise of manufacturing, looking like he hadn't slept properly in weeks. Because he hadn't.
She didn't try to convince him to go home. She knew better. Instead she got a sleeping bag and slept on the factory floor next to him. A 70 year old woman. A supermodel who had appeared on magazine covers. A mother of three successful children. Lying on a concrete floor in a car factory because her son was there and she was not going to leave him sleeping alone.
Maye has described Elon's childhood as one she worried about constantly. The bullying. The reading obsession. The emotional distance from his father. The decision to leave South Africa at 17. Every phase of his life involved a form of isolation that a mother could see but couldn't fix. The factory floor was another version of the same isolation. Different decade. Same boy. Alone with a problem.
She has said that the hardest part of being Elon's mother is not the controversy or the media. It is watching a child work himself to the edge of physical collapse and knowing that asking him to stop would be like asking him to stop breathing. The drive is not a choice. It is architecture. She has watched it operate since he was a child reading encyclopedias for 10 hours. The scale changed. The architecture didn't.
A mother who raised three children alone. Who held five jobs simultaneously to keep them fed. Who built a career as a model in her 60s. That woman looked at the factory floor, looked at her son, and concluded that the best thing she could do was lie down beside him. Not to fix it. Not to lecture. To be there. On the floor. In the noise. So he wasn't alone.
The most powerful image in Elon Musk's life is not a rocket launch. It is a 70 year old mother on a factory floor next to a son she could never teach to rest.
50 years ago, Dave Allen told a joke about newspaper readers in 1976, it would become more famous 11 years after this on Yes, Prime Minister in 1987.
Poland should be the model for the rest of Europe.
Polska nie powtórzy błędów innych europejskich państw, nie będzie też za nie płacić. Twardo bronimy granicy przed nielegalną migracją, mamy własną politykę azylową (nie przyjmujemy wniosków), deportujemy tych, którzy łamią polskie prawo. W kwestii bezpieczeństwa będziemy bezwzględni. To usłyszeli ode mnie liderzy Europy w Brukseli.
You know that suffocating air at an airport
when everything goes to hell?
That was Chicago O’Hare.
Flight 412, delayed over three hours.
Everyone at the gate was ready to snap.
Guys in expensive suits screaming
in the face of a terrified gate agent.
Exhausted toddlers face down
on the carpet, sobbing.
Nobody looking anyone in the eye.
Just two thousand strangers
trapped in pure, ugly misery.
Then the intercom crackles to life.
"Ladies and gentlemen...
please welcome home the veterans
of today's Honor Flight."
And the entire terminal just froze.
Down the center of the concourse
came ten wheelchairs.
Ten old men in faded navy caps.
Eighty years ago, they were boys
walking straight into gunfire
so the world would not burn.
Right up front was a ninety eight year old man.
His hands were shaking hard,
clutching a tiny framed photo on his lap.
A black and white picture of a girl
with curled hair from 1944.
Smiling up at him.
Dead silence fell over that gate.
Then, a construction worker sitting on a bag,
dusty boots, neon orange vest,
he drops his phone.
He stands up.
And he starts clapping. Hard.
Next to him, a businessman slams his laptop shut
and stands.
Then five people behind them.
Then fifty.
Then the entire concourse.
In ten seconds flat,
two thousand miserable, furious strangers
lined both sides of that hallway
like a wall of living stone.
Teenagers ripped out their earbuds.
Dads hoisted their little boys
onto their shoulders.
Big, tough men pulled off their hats,
pressed them against their chests,
and did not even bother wiping away
the tears running down their faces.
The roar that bounced off the glass ceiling
was not just applause.
It was thunder.
It hit you right in the ribs.
And then, God, this is the part that wrecks you.
The ninety eight year old man
slides that photograph into his coat pocket.
And he tries to stand.
He wants to return the salute.
His hands grip the armrests,
his knuckles turning white,
but his knees are shaking so violently
they just buckle under him.
He cannot make it up alone.
Before his feet can slip,
a young Marine in uniform bolts forward.
At the exact same second,
another traveler lunges in from the crowd.
They do not say a word.
They just lock their hands under his elbows
and heave him straight up onto his feet.
Solid as an oak tree.
And that old warrior raises a trembling hand to his brow,
locking in the sharpest, proudest salute
you have ever seen.
Standing tall on the strength of two strangers,
while thousands of people cheered
until their voices gave out.
You want to know what the soul of a people looks like?
Do not watch the news.
Just watch how a room full of angry strangers
treats an old soldier
whose sword was laid down eighty years ago.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
🚨 Milan 🇮🇹
Italy has a new FAFO hero who’s breaking the internet
“The Man with the Stick”
(Knowing my country, I have a suspicion he might be an undercover cop, but he’s still an absolute legend!)
He was a magician with a basketball in his hands.
In 1942 a Dutch warship escaped the Japanese Navy by pretending to be an island. It worked.
By early March 1942, the Dutch East Indies were falling. The Japanese had crushed the Allied fleet at the Battle of the Java Sea. Java was about to be overrun. The last Dutch ships still afloat were ordered to run for Australia.
One of them was HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, a small, slow minesweeper about 180 feet long. She had almost no guns that could stop an airplane, and she couldn't outrun a Japanese destroyer if her life depended on it. Which it did.
She was supposed to make the escape with three other Dutch warships. Those ships were caught and sunk. Abraham Crijnssen was on her own.
Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Anton van Miert, came up with a plan that sounds insane.
The waters between Java and Australia are scattered with thousands of islands. Many of them are just tiny specks of land with a few trees on top. So the crew went ashore and cut down trees and jungle plants. They covered the entire ship in them, from bow to stern, until she looked like a small jungle-covered island. They painted the exposed parts of the hull gray and brown to look like rock and cliffs.
There was one catch. Islands don't move.
So during the day, the ship anchored right up against real islands and sat completely still. The crew refreshed the wilting leaves and stayed out of sight. Japanese planes flew overhead. They saw nothing but one more island.
At night, the "island" pulled up anchor and crept south toward Australia.
Night after night, day after day, she slipped through waters crawling with Japanese ships and aircraft.
After about eight days, the coast of Australia came into view. On March 20, 1942, Abraham Crijnssen sailed into Fremantle.
She was the last Allied ship to escape Java, and the only one of her class in the region to survive.
She went on to serve the rest of the war with the Royal Australian Navy hunting submarines.
And she's still around today. Abraham Crijnssen is preserved as a museum ship at the Dutch Navy Museum in Den Helder, in the Netherlands.
This scene from “Roman Holiday” (1953), directed by William Wyler, is still talked about by film fans. In Audrey Hepburn’s first movie, she plays Princess Anne, opposite Gregory Peck, who portrays an American reporter. Her character, who decides to run away for a day in order to be a normal young woman, has to preside over a stuffy ball in Rome at her country’s embassy. She loses her shoe, desperately feeling around for it. William Wyler said years later: “It was one of those moments that justify filmmaking. Losing the shoe wasn’t in the script, Audrey was nervous and she simply lost her balance, the way we all do sometimes. For a Princess to do it was so human and so charming, that we kept it in the film. We felt it symbolised, unconsciously, Princess Anne’s first move towards escaping the restrictions of her role, though of course she has to put the shoe back on at the end of the movie.”
Premise:
Incentives drive all human behavior.
The corollary:
How to destroy a country:
A vast social security and support system that serves as a magnet for those who would rather not work.
An open immigration policy that does not screen immigrants to determine their ability and willingness to provide for themselves and their families.
An open immigration policy that does not screen for political and/or religious ideologies that are a threat to the country.
Economic incentives large enough to incentivize immigrants on the state dole to have large numbers of children, but insufficient for educated and economically productive mothers to be able to quit to raise a family.
The declining fertility of the most educated and productive women due to their delay to begin a family as a result of their desire and/or need to advance their careers, among other reasons, to live a life they deem consistent with their educational achievements and/or to repay their student debts.
Amnesty programs that give citizenship and voting power to illegal immigrants without consideration of their economic productivity or their threat to the country due to their religious or political ideologies.
The changing demographics and increased population due to the above factors.
The state responding to protests by increasing social support.
The continued failure to punish and hold accountable violent and looting rioters.
Government managed by a massive and growing unelected bureaucracy.
Government fraud, waste, and abuse contributed to ballooning budgets.
Anti-business legislation that makes it difficult for businesses to compete in a global marketplace being disrupted by AI, including restrictions on firing even poorly performing employees.
Overly burdensome, globally uncompetitive, corporate taxation.
Continuous increases in personal taxes to raise funds to provide for the rapidly growing welfare state.
The substantial majority of the tax burden levied on a small percentage of the population.
A growing percentage of the electorate paying no taxes and receiving welfare.
The introduction or threat of a wealth tax including the taxation of unrealized gains, i.e., taxes on paper wealth.
The flight of the most productive business builders and highest taxpayers to lower tax countries with lesser security concerns.
A growing percentage of the electorate voting for candidates that support increased welfare and laws favorable to, and/or that match the cultural and ideological needs and desires of a growing unproductive immigrant population.
The rapid rise in anti-semitism and inadequate efforts to address this hatred.
Increased borrowing by the state to fund the growing social burden.
Higher sovereign interest rates due to all of the above.
The resulting need to reduce expenditures to make the math work.
Increasingly violent protests that make life less livable for the productive and law abiding citizens leading to their accelerated departure.
And so on…
George Harrison stands at the gates of Friar Park,staring at what most people would call a disaster.
The Victorian mansion is decaying. Grass grows through the floors. The once-famous gardens are wild and overrun. Greenhouses have collapsed. Grottoes are buried. Paths have vanished under decades of neglect.
He’s 27. The Beatles have just broken up. He could go anywhere. Do anything. The world is waiting for his next move.
Instead, he buys the ruin and starts digging.
Not as a hobby. As a way of life.
He hires ten gardeners and works beside them from dawn until midnight, hands in the soil. His sister-in-law sees the place and asks what he’s thinking. George doesn’t explain. He just keeps working.
His son Dhani grows up watching his father gardening by moonlight, squinting in the dark because the shadows hide the imperfections that bothered him during the day. The music industry keeps calling — albums, tours, interviews. More George Harrison, the Beatle.
George wants to plant trees.
Friar Park isn’t just a garden. It’s a strange Victorian dream: caves, tunnels, a four-acre Alpine rock garden topped with a miniature Matterhorn, and gnomes everywhere. He even photographs himself among them for All Things Must Pass — then goes back to pruning.
When a nursery owner mentions slow sales, George buys one of everything. When someone offers 800 types of maple trees, he takes them all. His wife Olivia remembers him saying, “It’s not my garden, Liv.” He saw himself as a caretaker. The garden didn’t belong to him — he belonged to it.
By 1980, he publishes his autobiography and dedicates it “to gardeners everywhere.” He writes that he’s simple. He doesn’t want the business full-time. He’s a gardener. He plants flowers and watches them grow.
Journalists visit and call it un-rock-star-like. George doesn’t mind. He’s lived Beatlemania, stadium screams, cultural revolutions. Compared to restoring hedges, it felt empty.
After John Lennon’s murder, the gates close for good. George and Olivia keep working — not for visitors, but for the work itself.
He dies in 2001. Today, the gardens are considered masterpieces of Victorian landscaping. Olivia still tends them. The estate remains private.
George Harrison chose dirt under his fingernails over applause.
And in that choice, he found something stadiums never gave him.
Freedom.
"Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created. This is especially true of the good things that come to us as collective assets: peace, freedom, law, civility, public spirit, the security of property, and family life, in all of which we depend on the cooperation of others while having no means singlehandedly to obtain it. In respect of such things, the work of destruction is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation slow, laborious, and dull." How to Be a Conservative
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😉😆😆
🖼️ Cartoon courtesy of Scott Hilburn.
#HistoryHumour
The best Japanese admiral of WW2 wasn't Yamamoto. It was a destroyer commander the Americans nicknamed "Tenacious Tanaka."
Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka.
No carriers. No battleships. Just a squadron of destroyers, a stack of the best torpedoes in the world, and a nearly impossible job.
August 1942. US Marines have landed on Guadalcanal and grabbed the airfield. Japan needs to land troops and supplies on the island to take it back. But American planes from that airfield own the skies during the day. Any Japanese transport caught in daylight gets sunk.
So Tanaka moves at night.
His destroyers race down "the Slot," the channel through the Solomon Islands, arrive off Guadalcanal after dark, unload, and are gone before dawn. Over and over. Night after night. The Marines started calling it the "Tokyo Express." It ran so regularly you could almost set a watch by it.
Destroyers aren't cargo ships, though. So Tanaka's men got creative. They packed supplies into steel drums, roped the drums together, and pushed them overboard near shore so troops could swim out and haul them in. Destroyers built to fight were now delivering groceries under fire.
Then came the night of November 30, 1942.
Tanaka is heading for Guadalcanal with eight destroyers. Six of them are loaded down with supply drums, decks cluttered, not ready for a fight. He's told to expect trouble.
Trouble is waiting. An American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers under Rear Admiral Carleton Wright. The Americans have radar. The Japanese don't. Wright detects Tanaka first. On paper, this should be a massacre.
But the Americans hesitate before firing torpedoes. When they do open fire, they pour almost everything into one Japanese destroyer, Takanami, and quickly sink it.
The muzzle flashes give the American cruisers away.
Tanaka doesn't panic. His crews have trained for exactly this. Within minutes, his destroyers fire spreads of Type 93 torpedoes, the weapon the Americans would later call the "Long Lance." Huge, fast, running on pure oxygen so they left almost no wake, and with a range far beyond anything the US Navy thought was possible.
The torpedoes come out of the dark.
USS Minneapolis is hit and loses her bow. USS New Orleans takes a hit that sets off a magazine and blows off her entire bow, nearly 150 feet of ship. USS Pensacola is hit and burns. USS Northampton takes two torpedoes and sinks.
In about half an hour, a force of half-loaded destroyers had crippled or sunk four heavy cruisers. Around 400 Americans were killed. Japan lost one destroyer.
The Battle of Tassafaronga is still considered one of the worst US Navy defeats of the war. Even the official American naval historian later praised Tanaka for it.
And here's the twist.
Tanaka understood something his bosses refused to accept. Guadalcanal was lost. Feeding an island by throwing drums off destroyers wasn't a strategy. It was a slow bleed of ships and men Japan couldn't replace. He said so.
In December 1942, after his flagship was sunk and he was wounded, he was removed from command. He never commanded at sea again. He spent the rest of the war in shore assignments, sidelined.
Two months later, Japan evacuated Guadalcanal.
Tanaka survived the war and lived until 1969. The man the Americans respected most was the one his own navy didn't want to listen to.
https://t.co/cWGcJTE3iX
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