Henry White

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

In the year 756, a grieving empress of Japan donated
her late husband's dearest belongings to a temple in Nara.

They were placed in a wooden warehouse
called the Shosoin.

Persian glass goblets. Silver ewers from ancient Iran.
Musical instruments, medicines, games, textiles
from across China, India, Central Asia.

Scholars call this warehouse
"the final destination of the Silk Road."

Nearly 9,000 treasures. In near-mint condition.
The oldest surviving silks on Earth
that were never buried in a tomb.

Now, the question that should keep you up at night:

How does a wooden shed full of treasure
survive 1,270 years without being looted?

Egypt's treasures survived because they were sealed
inside tombs, hidden under tons of stone.
Most of the world's ancient wonders that remain
survived by being lost.

The Shosoin was never lost. It sat in plain sight,
in the middle of a city, for thirteen centuries.

Its security system?

A strip of paper.

The lock is sealed with paper
bearing the Emperor's personal signature.
To break the seal without permission is unthinkable.

That's it. That was always it.

Not even the shoguns, the military rulers of Japan,
could open that door.
For one stretch, it stayed shut for 140 straight years
because no one had the authority to look inside.

Once a year, each October, an imperial envoy
travels from Tokyo to break the seal,
air out the treasures, and seal it again.

They have been doing this, on schedule,
since before the Vikings existed.

Anywhere else, this is a heist movie waiting to happen.

In Japan, it's just a piece of paper that has said
"please don't" for 1,270 years.

And for 1,270 years, everyone hasn't.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Everyone knows Washington, D.C.'s cherry blossoms came from Japan.

Almost nobody knows the story nearly ended in a bonfire.

In 1910, Tokyo sent 2,000 cherry trees to America as a gift.
Inspectors found them infested with insects.
President Taft ordered every single one burned.

Two thousand gifts. Ashes.

Imagine the diplomatic disaster. The wounded pride.

Here is what Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, actually did:

He apologized. For the condition of his own gift.
Then his city grew 3,020 new trees, healthier and finer,
grafted and inspected and perfect,
and sent them across the ocean again.

Not a word of resentment. Try again, properly.

Those are the trees you photograph every spring at the Tidal Basin.
Two of the 1912 originals are still standing.

But the story doesn't end there. It comes full circle.

The parent grove in Japan, on the banks of the Arakawa River,
was devastated during World War II.

So in 1952, America cut budwood from the Washington trees
and sent it back to Japan, to resurrect
the very grove the gift had come from.

When a flood damaged the Japanese trees again in 1982,
Washington sent more cuttings home.

Read that again.

The daughters of the burned gift saved their mothers.

Today the two rivers, the Potomac and the Arakawa,
are officially sister rivers.
Their trees carry each other's blood.

One hundred and fourteen years of two countries
quietly taking care of the same flowers.

That's what sincerity looks like
when you give it a century to bloom.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

The oldest wooden buildings on Earth are not in Europe.
Not in China. Not in Egypt.

They are in a quiet village in Nara, Japan.

Horyu-ji temple. Its main hall and five-story pagoda
have been standing for about 1,300 years.

Scientists ran a tree-ring analysis on the pagoda's
central pillar. The tree was cut down in the year 594.

The wood in that tower is more than 1,400 years old.

And it stands in Japan. Earthquake country.
Thirteen centuries of tremors, typhoons, and storms.
The five-story pagoda has never fallen.

The builders used almost no nails.
They cut joints so precise that wood locks into wood,
flexing in an earthquake instead of snapping,
a design so clever modern engineers still study
how the central pillar swallows the shaking.

But here is my favorite part.

The carpenters used hinoki cypress trees
that were 2,000 years old.

Tsunekazu Nishioka, the last master carpenter
of the temple's great 20th-century restoration,
a man whose family served this one temple for generations,
explained why:

A 2,000-year-old cypress, he said, stays strong
for centuries after it's cut.
"The building will be fine for another 700 years."

Then he said the thing I can't forget:

the original builders, thirteen centuries ago, knew this.
They chose those trees because they were building
for people a thousand years away.

Every craftsman who ever touched Horyu-ji
knew he would never live to see
whether his work truly lasted.

He did the work perfectly anyway.

That is the entire secret of Japan,
standing quietly in a field in Nara,
holding up its own roof for 1,300 years.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

There is a hotel in Japan that opened in the year 705.

Not 1705. The year 705.

Rome still had an emperor in Constantinople.
The Vikings hadn't touched a boat yet.
America wouldn't exist for another thousand years.

The same family has run it for 52 generations.
Same hot spring. Same valley. Same job:
take care of the traveler.

It holds the world record as the oldest hotel on Earth,
and it is still taking reservations tonight.

And it's not alone.

A Japanese construction company was founded in 578,
building temples. It operated for over 1,400 years.

Japan has tens of thousands of companies
more than a century old —
more than any other country on the planet.

There's even a word for them: shinise.
Old shop. Said with deep respect.

In a world obsessed with scaling fast,
disrupting everything and selling the company by 40,
Japan quietly built something else:

businesses designed to outlive
everyone who will ever work in them.

Somewhere in Japan tonight, a 52nd-generation innkeeper
is checking the temperature of the same spring
her ancestor checked while Europe was in the Dark Ages.

That's not a business plan.
That's a promise, kept for 1,300 years.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

The world's oldest café has one item on the menu.

It has been in Kyoto since the year 1000.

Not the 1900s. Not the 1800s.
The year one thousand.

It's called Ichiwa. A tiny tea house by a shrine gate,
run by the same family for 25 generations.

They sell aburi-mochi: little rice cakes on bamboo skewers,
grilled over a charcoal fire, covered in sweet white miso sauce.

That's it. That's the menu.
It has been the menu for a thousand years.

When this shop opened, Vikings were still raiding Europe.
The samurai class didn't exist yet.

And a family in Kyoto lit a charcoal fire
and started grilling mochi for tired pilgrims.

That fire has customers to this day.

Reporters have asked the family the secret
to surviving a thousand years.
The answer is almost embarrassing in its simplicity:

they never expanded. Never franchised.
Never added a second item.
They decided one small thing mattered,
did it perfectly, and kept doing it.

For a millennium.

My favorite detail:
across the street stands their rival,
a shop selling the same mochi since 1637.

Four hundred years old,
and the neighborhood still thinks of it
as the new place.

An order costs about three dollars.
You sit on a bench by an old shrine,
and you eat the exact same warm, smoky sweet
that a dusty traveler ate in the year 1000.

Some countries put history behind glass.

Japan hands it to you on a skewer
and asks if you'd like more tea.

[Ford News @FordJohnathan5]

BREAKINGNEWS @EricLDaugh can we get an update on you feed please. Thanks from the millions of people that cant handle liars. 🚨

[Kimberly Prather, Ph.D. @kprather88]

I emailed Dr. Tony Fauci today to tell him how disgusted and sad I was with how he has been being treated. I told him he is a hero and has my support and my admiration.

I reminded him who I was: the “aerosol activist.” During COVID I pushed him — and pushed him, and would not let it go — until he said out loud that the SARS-2 virus travels through the air. He graciously heard me out in a Zoom meeting. He changed what he said. That is not a small thing in a man with that much on his shoulders.

So today I sent a note of thanks, and shared our latest work on the Tijuana River at the US-Mexico border. I almost didn’t send it. He is flooded right now, and I figured it might never reach him.

He wrote back within the hour. Thanked me, and told me to keep up the great work.

A man under relentless attack still made time to answer someone he owed nothing to — and to encourage her work while he’s fighting for his own name. Gracious, ethical, kind. Exactly the qualities the people going after him are trying to strip out of our society.

I stand with Dr. Fauci. He is a hero. Sad times in America continue.

[Sufiya Sufi Runner @sufirunner]

It’s day 81 and the Mighty ChangLa Pass is next today.

Have to run on 17586 ft. Weather is not what you expect for running across this high pass.

It’s going to be tough but here I am, ready to survive through this.

Let’s do this. See you on the top.

#runacrossindia #kanyakumaritokarakoram #changla #ladakh

[Voices From Vietnam @VoicesfromNam]

Joe Hooper was the kind of soldier who was magnificent in combat and a headache everywhere else. Born in South Carolina in 1938 and raised in Washington state, he did a hitch in the Navy, then joined the Army and became a paratrooper. He was brave to the point of recklessness and a discipline problem in garrison, busted down in rank more than once for drinking and brawling. But when the shooting started, there were few men in the entire war you would rather have beside you.

On February 21, 1968, during the Tet Offensive near Hue, Staff Sergeant Hooper was a squad leader in Company D of the 501st Infantry, 101st Airborne, when his company attacked a heavily fortified enemy position dug in along a river. The far bank was a wall of bunkers, rockets and automatic weapons fire. Hooper led his men across that river straight into it, and then he simply did not stop for the rest of the day.

He was wounded early, and he refused to leave. He went bunker to bunker, knocking them out with grenades and rifle fire, sometimes fighting hand to hand. When he saw wounded Americans lying exposed, he ran out through the fire and dragged them back to cover, then went right back to attacking. He was hit again and kept going. Over the course of that one day he personally cleared bunker after bunker and killed a large number of the enemy, more than twenty by the count in his citation, refusing medical treatment the entire time so he could keep leading his men. Only after the position was finally taken did he let anyone treat his wounds.

President Nixon put the Medal of Honor around his neck in 1969. And here is the thing about Joe Hooper. That was not the half of it. Across his tours he was wounded eight times and earned an astonishing rack of decorations, two Silver Stars, six Bronze Stars, eight Purple Hearts, dozens of awards in all. By many counts he stands as one of the most decorated American soldiers in the nation's history, mentioned in the same breath as Audie Murphy and Alvin York.

His story does not have a clean, happy ending, and that is worth telling honestly too. Hooper struggled to come home. The same fearless intensity that made him unstoppable in a firefight did not translate to peacetime, and he battled drinking and a restlessness he could never quite settle. He died in 1979 of a brain hemorrhage at just 40 years old, far too young.

He is buried at Arlington. A soldier who could not always fit the peacetime Army, but who on one long, bloody day outside Hue was as brave as any American who ever lived.

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

The self-appointed referee fired all the referees. Here's the tell:
Day five, Trump fires 17 inspectors general.
Weeks later, the ethics office director…first president in history to do it. No ethics pledge. Biden's ethics rules…GONE.
You don't remove every referee…unless you're planning to commit FOULS.
Then came the meme coin.
The family defense deals.
The donor-funded ballroom.
The pardon for a felon whose mother bought a seat at a million-dollar table.
None of it's an accident.
It's a business model.
The corruption isn't the scandal.
The corruption is the PLAN.

[Travis Akers 🇺🇸 @travisakers]

What in the fresh hell?

[Rep. Jack Kimble @RepJackKimble]

Tell me, where in the world is Senator McConnell

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

Elaine Chao: Senator McConnell is a very strong supporter of ICE. He’s been on it for almost two months.

[CATTURBO ™ @realcatturbo]

I’m not too far from 4000 followers. #smokefleet

[Connie Han @echtzeitklavier]

Let’s get my Instagram account back to 46,000 followers after being banned FOUR TIMES for being too real! Follow me at https://t.co/HP6XXVW0lc

[Nurses Against Dick Pics. 🪷🇺🇦 @ClaudetteGGibs1]

Fire @JesseBWatters

[Covie @covie_93]

RIP Lindsey Graham, you would've loved Andrew Tate's arrest outfit.

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

I spent the last few months talking to people across the political spectrum, and to people who want nothing to do with politics at all. Here is what I learned.

We are not a divided country. We are a country being divided, on purpose, by an American oligarchy that profits from the fight. They’ve captured our government, denied our healthcare, looted our treasury, and saddled us with crippling debt.

I believe in a New New Deal. Healthcare as a human right. The right of every family to a decent home, and an end to endless wars.

And a dividend paid to every American from the AI economy, because these machines were built on the whole of human inheritance. That inheritance belongs to all of us, and not just to the handful of men playing God with our very existence.

And none of it happens if we just move on. Donald Trump, his family, and his administration are robbing us blind, not just of our money, but of our faith in one another, and they have to answer for it. Truth and reconciliation, not revenge. Then we break the system that let them do it.

The question is not whether we will lose our democracy. The question is whether we will fight to take back what has already been stolen.

I learned in recovery that you can’t heal what you won’t name. Neither can a country.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

When I was a judge at the Department of Labor, black lung cases were the biggest part of my docket. Miners applying for black lung benefits are entitled to a hearing within close proximity to where they live, so I traveled to coal country regularly to provide them their day in court.

Often, the miner would enter the hearing room pulling along a portable oxygen tank to aid with breathing. I watched some who’d have to stop for a minute and catch their breath as they walked a hundred feet or so from the parking lot to the building. Sometimes it was the widow of a miner who showed up for the hearing because the miner died before his case could be heard.

Trump calling it the “beautiful clean coal industry” is like calling the current explosive diarrhea epidemic a “delightful colon evacuation opportunity.” From the deadly coal dust inside the mines to the toxic coal ash residue leftover after it’s burned, there’s nothing beautiful or clean about coal at any point in the process.

When the Black Lung Benefits Act was first enacted, it established a presumption in favor of the miners if they could prove they worked at least 15 years in the mines and had a totally disabling lung condition. When Reagan was President, the presumption in favor of the miners was abolished and the balance shifted in favor of the coal companies who were trying to avoid paying benefits. The presumption in favor of the miners was restored in the Affordable Care Act thanks to Senator Robert Byrd. When I used to write black lung decisions I would note that it was Obamacare that shifted the burden back in favor of the miners and made it harder for the coal companies to avoid paying benefits to the men that coal mining left disabled.

The condition that the father and son in the article have, progressive massive fibrosis, is called complicated pneumoconiosis. It’s incurable and it’s not a question of will it kill you, it’s a question of how fast you’ll die. It gets harder and harder to breathe as the scarring in the lungs increases and you’ll feel like you’re suffocating as you struggle to draw a breath. Eventually, you’ll suffer respiratory failure and then you’re gone.

Trump likes to throw around the word “hoax.” Well, hoax is the right word to describe so called “clean coal.” It’s also the right word to describe Trump’s claim that he loves coal miners.

https://t.co/LBfd22F70a

[Jim Acosta @Acosta]

This was another deranged dictator speech from Trump. No evidence was presented that votes were changed in 2020. The only election fraudster is Trump. He tried to overturn a free and fair election. My reaction to this dangerous speech: