Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃

That old saw about- To understand all is to forgive all- is a lot of tripe. Some things, the more you understand the more you loathe them.- Heinlein

[Brix @Brix1701]

@MichaelShanks I think it’s time to send postcards. X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube are one thing, but nothing beats physical mail.

Be nice!

Amazon MGM Studios
9336 Washington Boulevard
Culver City, CA 90232

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@grahamformaine What about poser, or poseur for My Maine relations of French descent?

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@DarrigoMelanie Has Elon hurt anything other than your feelings by becoming wealthy?

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@grahamformaine Poseur jealous or what?

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

> you’ll never start a rocket company
> you’ll never build your own engines
> you’ll never be able to use off-the-shelf parts
> you’ll never survive three launch failures
> you’ll never reach orbit
> you’ll never win NASA’s trust
> you’ll never launch cargo to the ISS
> you’ll never compete with Boeing
> you’ll never compete with Lockheed
> you’ll never make rockets reusable
> you’ll never land a rocket vertically
> you’ll never land one on a drone ship
> you’ll never reuse a booster
> you’ll never fly the same booster 10 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 20 times
> you’ll never fly the same booster 30 times
> you’ll never recover and reuse the fairing
> you’ll never lower launch costs
> you’ll never launch every month
> you’ll never launch every week
> you’ll never launch multiple times a week
> you’ll never carry astronauts
> you’ll never replace Roscosmos
> you’ll never fly civilians to orbit
> you’ll never manufacture satellites at scale
> you’ll never build the biggest constellation ever
> you’ll never make satellite internet work
> you’ll never make satellite internet fast
> you’ll never make satellite internet affordable
> you’ll never serve rural customers
> you’ll never serve aircraft and ships
> you’ll never build a methane rocket engine
> you’ll never make full-flow staged combustion work
> you’ll never build the most powerful rocket ever
> you’ll never build a rocket bigger than Saturn V
> you’ll never build it out of stainless steel
> you’ll never launch Starship
> you’ll never separate Super Heavy and Starship
> you’ll never relight Raptor in space
> you’ll never bring Super Heavy back
> you’ll never catch a booster with Mechazilla tower arms
> you’ll never launch 85% of mass to orbit worldwide
> you’ll never change the economics of space
> you’ll never force the entire industry to copy you
> you’ll never win
> you’ll never IPO

Congratulations to @elonmusk and the SpaceX team. You did what countless people said was impossible, and you did it time and time again.

Today is your day. You deserve this. May it be a glorious one.

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@JohnCornyn @EliLake Cormyn’s spirit animal.

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@AmazonMGMStudio I’m on the bridge crew of a ZPM powered BC-304 trying to make contact with Destiny. Poor Eli has probably lost his marbles by now. #SaveStargate

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

There's a falcon the size of a robin that'll hunt your yard for free. And you can build it a house this weekend.

The American kestrel hovers over open ground and drops on grasshoppers, voles, and mice all day. It's the most widespread falcon in North America, found in nearly every state, and it's down by roughly half since the 1960s.

The reason is fixable: kestrels nest in tree holes they can't dig themselves, and we keep cutting down the dead trees that hold them. No cavity, no nest.

So give them one.

The whole box comes out of a single 8-foot 1x10. A 7¾-inch floor, a body about a foot and a half tall with a sloped roof you hinge at the top for cleaning, a 3-inch round hole up near the front, and 3 inches of wood chips in the bottom, since they bring no nesting material of their own. White pine, an afternoon, about twenty bucks.

Hang it 10 to 20 feet up on a pole or a dead tree at the edge of a field, pasture, or big open lawn, with the hole facing the open ground and pointed south or east. Put a baffle on the pole so raccoons can't climb to it.

[Seán Fhirnuin Óg Coinnigh @svkenney]

Spent the weekend in @colonialwmsburg and the place was a practical ghost town. Few tourists, some groups, but there was nobody there.

The bookstore was practically empty and gone were the stacks that were carefully curated some 5-10 years ago before the pandemic. There was nothing of merit to take from the gift stores other than tchotchkes. Mugs you can find at suttler stores online for $15 were being sold for $40. CW used to sell seeds much like Monticello, but that's now long gone.

Even the things made at CW were in very short supply, and that which was available was mindbogglingly overpriced. Sorry -- no one is paying $4 for a hand-wrought nail.

One would think there would be all sorts of tools and gardening supplies. Nope -- nothing to bring home and make a small corner of your world a 24/7 and 365 day a year advertisement of CW.

Then there's the problem that makes things a bit worse. For the last 25 years, we have moved the narrative from every person being able to share a bit of the American story towards something more hostile -- namely, that America is a deeply flawed experiment and there is little to nothing to celebrate much less appreciate. If you are a young person interested in history, what are you learning about America? Why pay $25 for a ticket, $25 for a lunch, $100 for a dinner and $100 on hats, t-shirts, magnets, etc. to participate in a thing that everyone -- in order to be socially adaptable today -- believes is at core flawed and therefore evil?

It's not just that living history is dying at Colonial Williamsburg. It's not just the message that we should be ashamed of our history. It's not just the fact that it seems as if half of Colonial Williamsburg is closed or too expensive to access. It's not just the fact that tchotchkes rather than seeds, tools, pamphlets, books, and all the things an 18th century Virginian might have brought home from Williamsburg are practically gone.

And it's not just that something is missing, but rather the heart of the thing is being swapped out.

Now there are a lot of people who are still working at CW who clearly love the place. There are plenty of opportunities -- especially in a world where smartphones are conquering everything -- to get people to set the technology down and re-engage in crafts and trades and understanding that our post-manufacturing age began with tradecraft as soulcraft, and that those trades weren't always neat and clean to 21st century sensibilities (or 20th century ones).

Yet one gets the sense that Colonial Williamsburg is reverting to an architectural museum in order to avoid the question "should we love America?"

The answer to that question should be more than a kneejerk and patriotic yes, but a thoughtful and overwhelming "of course!" if for no other reason than the Virginians uniquely broke out of a colonial framework and aspired to human freedom. Imperfectly, yes -- but thank God they did, because much of the world wouldn't be what it is today without the courage of a handful.

I will always love Colonial Williamsburg and Monticello and Montpelier and Wakefield and Stratford and Chatham and Ferry Farm and Mount Vernon and all of the places that remind us how special Virginia truly is. Yet between the marketing bros, the fear of being right, and the choice to adopt the material over meaning because it is safer to do so? We lose the thing itself in the process.

Colonial Williamsburg has weathered changes in the past, but always with an anchor. One worries that the tether to that anchor is being hacked away by myopic people who might not give a damn or understand the stakes.

Tradecraft as soulcraft, please. To anyone at CW who might actually care, re-invest in the romance. America is easy to love, I promise.

[The Uri @uricohenisrael]

Maine Kampf.

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@RoKhanna @grahamformaine Misogyny and nazism are of secondary concern when it comes to “Saving Our Democracy” TM.

[blue @bluewmist]

I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@BasedMikeLee Ask the pope to reconvene Lateran IV.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

Hello Mr. Hunter Biden,

You're getting six-digit likes on every post lately. I don't have any hope to ratio you or whatever through traditional "Hello" means.

But for those uninitiated, those who are captivated by your fake-humble persona obviously PR-engineered to capture unsuspecting disaffected Republicans:

You are not some humility, witty guy turning over a new leaf. You are the ultimate proof of nepotism, everything that the so-called "Epstein Class" is supposed to represent.

Let me explain - off the top of my head.

You were a board member of USGLC. U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. The most powerful NGO that nobody's ever heard of. Last year, I documented in several threads, how Liz Schrayer, USGLC lead, took credit for ramming through a 90 billion dollar bill for Ukraine in 2024, even as @mattvanswol demonstrated that Western North Carolina got zero help in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene because FEMA threw up their hands and said they ran out of funds.

USGLC, arguably, is the most powerful NGO that nobody has ever heard of. It includes a bunch of corporations, a bunch of nonprofit leads, and ... for some magical reason, I documented, extensively, linked, that Liz Schrayer started pursuing you in 2012. During the Obama years, when you were Biden's son. Are you a former Secretary of State? No. Are you a CEO of a Fortune 500 company? No. That puts you below the average USGLC board member, by a good tier.

So what DID get you on USGLC? The only reason: that you were the son of a sitting Vice President known for corruption, and you yourself were known for corruption.

You are not "folksy." You are the worst of the worst of the elite. Most of the elite, at least, get their credentials through Georgetown/George Washington/Harvard Kennedy. You got yours purely on nepotism. Any photographs you have of yourself at motels is proof that you are so incompetent that you waste all your money, not that you come from humble beginnings. Because others like @MarcoPolo501c3 have thoroughly documented that you benefited a great deal from your nepotism.

You even tried to bait those in with saying you prefer to keep immigration "legal" - but we all know the trap that keeps illegal immgrants here: outlaw deportations, and make every immigrant case "asylum", and magically, everyone who might've been here illegally a few years ago is legal.

You may get 175K likes on your semi-subverting, PR-designed photographs. But those of us who know, know you're fake.

https://t.co/vMml22uCbu

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@TahraHoops

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@BasedMikeLee Describe your Trinitarian theology.

[Joe McCarthy is my spirit animal🦃 @Lightmedic]

@TedRall Spitballing here if you have marketable skills.

[Garrett Exner @Exner_Garrett]

Ray’s Rock - Omaha Beach

On the morning of June 6, 1944, 23 year old Staff Sergeant Arnold “Ray” Lambert came ashore with the first wave of the 1st Infantry Division on the eastern side of Omaha Beach. At this small patch of concrete he saved nearly 20 lives:

The division came under intense fire from several German bunkers surrounding the entrance to the Colville Draw (one of two exits off Omaha Beach). Ray, a medic, immediately went to work.

He was shot in the arm. Moments later he was hit by shrapnel in the leg, but Ray kept pulling men to safety. He pulled nearly 20 wounded soldiers to cover behind this 8ft wide obstacle, treating each soldier before going out in search of others.

After several hours under fire, while pulling a wounded soldier from the ocean, he was struck by a landing craft. It dropped its ramp on top of him, breaking his back. He fell face down in the water, drowning. The craft backed up and nearby soldiers pulled an unconscious Ray to safety, eventually evacuating him off the beach.

Remarkably, Ray had already earned two Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts in Sicily and North Africa, prior to landing in France. But here in Normandy his war would end.

He awoke in a hospital back in England a day later. In the next bed over was his brother, who had also been wounded at Omaha.

When asked about his work on D-Day, Ray simply said, “I did what I was called to do.”

Ray Lambert passed in 2021 at 100 years old. He exemplified the best of American grit and why remembering this day is so important.

[South Doc @GeorgeDAndrews2]

After the surrender of Confederate forces under Confederate General Richard Taylor in Citronelle, Alabama, on May 4, 1865, the respective staffs of both sides met at a social luncheon. Union General Peter Joseph Osterhaus, a recent "German 48er" immigrant, approached General Taylor and spoke in broken English. Osterhaus told Taylor that Southerners would now be instructed in the true American principles to learn to become good Americans.

Taylor, the son of a President and the grandson of a Revolutionary War soldier, responded with biting, witty sarcasm.

From Taylor's memoirs,
"I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightened his understanding. My friend smiled blandly and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. Happily for the world, since the days of Huss and Luther, neither tyranny nor taste can repress the Teutonic intellect in search of truth or exposure of error. A kindly, worthy people, the Germans, but wearing on occasions."

The absurdity of an immigrant Union officer, ignorant of American Founding principles, political history, and culture, lecturing an old-stock Southerner, whose family had been here from the very beginning, on Americanism.