Mark I

Dad, husband and knowledge of all things related to water

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Here is a man who won one of the first great American victories of the Revolution without fighting a battle. He was not a soldier. He was a fat, cheerful Boston bookseller with no military training, and what he pulled off in the winter of 1775 into 1776 is one of the most staggering feats of sheer willpower and logistics in American history. His name was Henry Knox.

Knox learned war the way he learned everything: from books. He ran a fashionable bookshop in Boston, and he devoured the military engineering and artillery treatises on his own shelves. When the Revolution broke out, that self-taught knowledge suddenly mattered, because the American army besieging British-held Boston had a fatal problem. They had the enemy penned in the city, but they had almost no heavy cannon to force them out. It was a stalemate, and stalemates favored the British.

Knox had an audacious idea. Nearly 300 miles away, at Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York, sat a treasure of captured British artillery, dozens of heavy cannon and mortars taken earlier in the war. What if someone went and got them? Brought the guns to Boston? Everyone could see the problem: it was winter, the route ran through frozen lakes, rivers, forests, and the snowbound Berkshire mountains, and the guns weighed a combined 60 tons. Sixty tons. It sounded impossible. Washington gave the 25-year-old bookseller the job anyway.

And Knox did it. He got to Ticonderoga and set to work dismantling and hauling out around 59 pieces of artillery, some of them massive. He had 40 heavy sledges specially built. He rounded up teams of oxen, dozens and dozens of them, and boats to move the guns across the water before the freeze. And then, through the brutal heart of a New England winter, he dragged 120,000 pounds of iron and brass across a frozen wilderness.

Picture it. Cannon lashed to sleds, oxen straining in the snow, men breaking through ice, hauling the guns up and then carefully down the icy slopes of the Berkshires, where a runaway sled could be a disaster. Guns broke through frozen rivers and had to be fished out. It was backbreaking, dangerous, freezing work, mile after mile, week after week. And this untested bookseller held it all together by force of personality and organization. In under two months, he brought the entire "noble train of artillery" 300 miles through the dead of winter, and in late January 1776 he reported to Washington that the guns had arrived.

Then came the payoff. On a single night in early March, Washington's men quietly hauled Knox's cannon up onto Dorchester Heights, the high ground overlooking Boston and its harbor. When the British woke up, they found the American army suddenly looking down their throats with heavy artillery that could smash their ships and their positions. Their commander realized the city was untenable. And so, rather than fight, the British evacuated Boston entirely on March 17, 1776, and sailed away. The Americans had liberated a major city without a battle, because a bookseller had done the impossible with oxen and sleds and nerve.

Knox never looked back. He became Washington's chief of artillery for the rest of the war, the man whose guns crossed the Delaware to Trenton and pounded the British into surrender at Yorktown, and after the war he became the young nation's first Secretary of War. Fort Knox is named for him. But his greatest monument is that winter journey. Remember Henry Knox, the bookseller who read about artillery in his shop, then went out and dragged 60 tons of it across a frozen wilderness to hand George Washington the guns that freed Boston.

[Alhaji Don wayne @Alhajidon]

This is what I paid internet for.

[CEOInterviews.AI @CEOinterview]

Big Short investor Steve Eisman says the AI labs know they have no moats and are manufacturing a crisis to get regulation that hands them a duopoly

"I think this is all nonsense."

[ You think it's all nonsense? ]

"All nonsense. I think that there's something else completely going on here. ... What I think is happening is that token maxing is over. The open weight models are taking big market share. I think these companies are very nervous. They realize that there are no moats around their business whatsoever, and they're trying to manufacture a crisis that will create regulation, and that they think they can then manipulate to create the moats, to create the duopoly that they want."

[ Wow. ]

"That's what I think is going on."

"Honestly, I think this whole Terminator thing is garbage. That's for sure."

[Doug Ponder @dougponder]

Thomas Aquinas on the nature of Islam from the beginning:

“The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men.

As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth. On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms [weapons]—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants.

What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning. Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms. Nor do divine pronouncements on the part of preceding prophets offer him any witness. On the contrary, he perverts almost all the testimonies of the Old and New Testaments by making them into fabrications of his own, as can be seen by anyone who examines his law.

It was, therefore, a shrewd decision on his part to forbid his followers to read the Old and New Testaments, lest these books convict him of falsity. It is thus clear that those who place any faith in his words believe foolishly.”

—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I.6

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@OldGuyWanders Are you in Charlestown?

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@victoria4nh What are you saying? Vote for Pappas?

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@victoria4nh Victoria, this type of thing has been going on in Boston schools for decades. Tufts, for example, was handing out pronoun pins over 9 years ago. The President apologized, but they are not interested in stopping it

[MAZE @mazemoore]

2010. President Obama shoots down the whole "stop deportations and just let the illegal immigrants be" argument that the Democrat party is currently pushing.

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@Viora_Tech_Ai This is just an advestisement disguised as an X post. Prime usually saves very little at Whole Foods. Prime music is annoying. Set up a play list and it won’t play it or just repeat a few songs over and over. If you want the playlist to work that cost $10 a month more.

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@galvatron261 @AiwithYasir Where can I get a soft start?

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@BishopBarron Jesus, Mary and Joseph had Herod the Great to deal with, we have Maura Healy.

[Bishop Robert Barron @BishopBarron]

I know I’ve been posting a lot recently, but as Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to say, “it’s a target-rich environment” right now.

The governor of Massachusetts just signed into law a statute that permits abortion up until the moment of birth, as long as mother and doctor give the go-ahead.
Please understand what this means. A fully-formed child, moments before exiting the birth canal, can be eviscerated, chopped into pieces, have its head crushed or skin burned off—all under the full protection of Massachusetts law.

What I found particularly gross was the reaction of the entirely female crowd around the female governor of Massachusetts as she signed this barbaric provision into law. They were clapping and cackling with delight because what can only be called infanticide can now be practiced with impunity in their state.

I’m old enough to remember when Mario Cuomo, the devoutly Catholic governor of New York, admitted that, though he found abortion personally repugnant, he was, after tortured wrestling with his conscience, willing to give it limited protection of law.

How far we have fallen from agonized and conflicted Cuomo to the present governor of Massachusetts and her entourage gleefully applauding the murder of children.

[Trust In Trump 47🇺🇸 @Trustintrump47]

MORE - DOGE Staffer Drops Bombshell After Bombshell About Inner Workings of IRS/Treasury Dept.

DOGE insider Sam Corcos, special adviser to the U.S. Treasury Department, just unloaded a jaw-dropping exposé on the IRS and Treasury’s chaotic operations.

He’s pulling the mask off, and it’s wild.

1]. IRS’ Massive IT Dept. Outstrips Midsize Banks by 175x Budget and 40x Staff

“A typical midsize bank will have somewhere between 1 and 200 people in IT and they have an operations and maintenance budget in like the $20 million a year range. We have 8,000 people in IT, and our operations and maintenance budget is $3.5 billion a year. I don’t really know why yet.”

2]. Contractors Eat Up 80% of IRS’ Massive Operations Budget

“I will tell that you 80% of that budget goes to contractors and licenses——We cannot perform the basic functions of tax collection without paying a toll to all these contractors.”

3]. IRS’ Modernization Is a $3.7 Billion Money Pit

“We have a $3.5 billion operations maintenance budget. We have $3.7 billion modernization effort within it. That’s a lot of budget and way beyond any reasonable cost for what you would expect at a private company for this.”

4]. Ghost Contracts Bleed Millions With No Accountability

“You find contracts that are 10, 20, 30, $50 million and you just ask like, why are we doing this? And everyone’s just like, meh, I don’t know. And then you cancel it and then nothing happens. It’s just inertia, has just taken over.”

FOLLOW ME, THE NEXT DROP WILL BE SHOCKING.

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@thatsKAIZEN Stopping crime also can stop racism

[Bob Woodson's Legacy @BobWoodson]

"I'm a steward; I'm not an owner...It is important for the legacy to continue." - Robert L. Woodson, Sr. (1937-2026)

This is more than an anniversary. As we commemorate 45 years of the @WoodsonCenter and the passing of the baton from our late founder #BobWoodson to our now president, Will Crossley, it’s a moment to celebrate what’s been accomplished—and to envision, together, what’s possible.

#legacyofresilience #spiritofrenewal

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

A succinct clip explaining Suicidal Empathy. Please share.

[Hans Mahncke @HansMahncke]

The corruption here is off the charts. Rand Paul has just released a trove of emails showing Fauci soliciting various so-called scientists to nominate him for awards, many of which Fauci then went on to win, receiving substantial prize money in the process.

This needs to be forensically dissected, preferably by the DOJ. But even looking at just one example, Barton Haynes of Duke, the questions are staggering. Fauci personally petitioned Haynes to nominate him for an award, which Fauci ultimately won, including $1 million in prize money. That alone raises serious ethical concerns.

But what really knocked me off my chair is that Haynes has received something like $1.2 billion (with a "B") in funding from Fauci’s NIAID. The entire system is totally compromised, with a small circle of elites effectively doing favors for one another, all at taxpayer expense.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

BREAKING: Ilhan Omar’s SISTER Has Been Linked to The “Feeding Our Future” Fraud Scandal

Sahra Noor runs a business that received a $2 million earmark while her sister, Ilhan, was a state representative and she founded a USAID-backed consulting group that “has secured more than $20 million in funding for health initiatives”

Her company was registered at the same address used by key figures charged in the scheme.

70 have been convicted in the scandal.

[Peter St Onge, Ph.D. @profstonge]

We’re roundabout 35,000 Learing Centers from the big 40 🥳

[Mark I @MarkI3436]

@KristinNobleNH Thanks for your work on this Kristin