Pam Mattoon

Follows Jesus; He’s my greatest love. 🇺🇸🎶☀️🌺🥑🍪🍺🏝🚘

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

Insightful!

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

We think of this evil as Marxism. In reality, Marxism is nothing more or less than the current instantiation of a much more ancient evil: possession by the envious and hateful spirit that drove Cain to murder his brother Abel.

The great book of Genesis thus portrays mankind as riven by an eternal fratricidal conflict.

Those who reject genuine sacrifice become embittered by their subsequent failure ("rejection by God").

Instead of repenting and changing, they turn to revenge.

And who do they target? Those who strive to do well and offer what is best.

I can't believe how much wisdom the author of Genesis 4 compressed into that story's few sentences. You might even come to believe that God Himself had a hand in it.

Truly: it's uncanny. The first two human beings born into history are, respectively, a good, honest productive man and his brother, who allows himself to be consumed by resentment and the desire to destroy.

Communism, in a nutshell.

[Wide Awake Media @wideawake_media]

Ann Widdecombe schools a roomful of woke students on the importance of free speech.

"Only two sorts of people oppose free speech... snowflakes and totalitarians."

"Nobody has the right to live their lives being protected from offence, or from insult, or from hurt feelings."

"It is an occupational hazard of living in society. And if you really can't take it, become a hermit."

"No matter how much we may disagree with somebody, we should defend to the hilt their right to say it."

"You succeed by defeating your opponent, not by wishing him away. You get nowhere by trying not to hear what is being said."

"You may feel virtuous today in what you will not hear, but tomorrow somebody may feel virtuous in not hearing what you have to say."

"Free speech is for all, not for the privileged few."

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

❤️🇺🇸🔥

[Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth]

The flyovers will continue until morale improves.

[Eric Daugherty @EricLDaugh]

🚨 Sec. Marco Rubio just NAILED IT:

"One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is that it 'sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.'"

"That's actually NOT TRUE. Communism does NOT sound good in theory. The world that envisions for all of us is small, flat, gray, leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul."

"The world that envisions is a world without courage, a world without creativity, or ambition, a world without heroes, or glory, or great causes to strive towards, without a world without miracles, without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things."

"And the world communism envisions is a world without God."

"For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievement of our civilization, for them, it's an unbearable humiliation, a reminder of what they cannot do and a reminder of what they cannot be. So they choose instead to destroy." 💯

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

I was talking to another believer about this exact thing last week. Their response was an incredulous, “that’s not natural!”

Correct. 😊
Lord, help me today, to be like you, not like me.

[Brant Hansen @branthansen]

Imagine if professing Christians really did this on social media and elsewhere, from I Corinthians:

“When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly.”

I'm sure it would be seen as weakness, or not really understanding the stakes, etc--even by Christian leaders and influencers. (As if people in first century Corinth had no real problems.)

But there it is. This is how we are supposed to act and respond. For real.

It's the opposite of weakness, of course. Weakness is allowing others to dictate your next move. Acting out of anger is the natural thing. Everybody does it. Toddlers do it. Congrats.

When you respond with blessing, you are free. When you turn the other cheek, you are saying, "You do not control me." It's strength, period.

What's more, when you respond to curses with blessing, you will grow up in real-time. Your heart will change. You'll experience freedom.

"The truth will set you free" isn't a free-standing phrase. Jesus says people who obey him will be able to know the truth, and then the truth wil set them free.

You CAN actually live this way. This way of life is an option. It's a path not often taken, but it leads to life.

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

🥇🎖️

[QUANTUM GUARD ™️ @QuantumGuard17]

🚨 Ready to have your mind blown?

Senator John Kennedy on Elon Musk and DOGE exposing USAID, “I'll tell you what Mr. Musk discovered. I find it fascinating. He discovered:

- The American taxpayers are giving money to Afghanistan
- He found that we are giving money to Yemen
- He found that we are giving money to Syria
- He found that the USAID has 10,000 people employees, and every year they give away $40 billion
- He found that the USAID gave money to support electric vehicles in Vietnam. Our money, taxpayer money
- He found that the USAID gave money to a transgender clinic in India. “I didn't know that. I bet you the American people didn't know that”
- He found that USAID gave $1.5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group, they got $1.5 million to QUOTE, “advanced diversity, equity, inclusion in Serbia's workplaces and business communities”
- They found that USAID spent $164 million to support radical organizations around the world
- They gave $122 million of that to groups aligned with foreign terrorist organizations
- According to this report in Mr. Musk, the USAID has given millions of dollars to quote organizations in Gaza controlled by Hamas
- He found that we gave $2 million, USAID did, for sex changes in Guatemala
- He found that we gave $20 million to produce a new Sesame Street show in Iraq
- He found that we gave $4.5 million of taxpayer money to combat misinformation in Kazakhstan
- He found that we gave $10 million, USAID did, of meals to an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group called the Nusra Front
- Mr. Musk found that we gave $7.9 million of taxpayer money to a project that would teach Sri Lankan journalists to avoid binary gendered language. (The USAID took 8 million bucks and gave it to a bunch of journalists in Sri Lanka to teach them how to avoid binary gendered language)
- USAID gave $1.5 million to promote LGBT advocacy in Jamaica
- They gave $1.5 million to rebuild the Cuban media ecosystem
- They gave $1.5 million for quote, art for inclusion of people with disabilities in Belarus
- Another $3.9 million for LGBT causes in Macedonia
- $8.3 million for equity and inclusion education in Nepal

“I could go all night and many of my colleagues are upset. They're really mad at Mr. Musk. Hell, I think we ought to give him a medal”

[InfantryDort @infantrydort]

Most Americans have no idea how hard the Founding Fathers fought NOT to fight. I mean they really exhausted every avenue with the king, and then some.

That tradition carries on today. We fight hard not to fight. Very hard.

But when we do?

Be somewhere else.

[Stephen Miller @StephenM]

At the end of a particularly thrilling and rollicking meeting in the Oval Office, Lindsey Graham turned to the room and said: “I’ve never had this much fun in my life.”

I cannot describe to you how much joy President Trump’s leadership and friendship brought to Lindsey. Meetings with Graham at the White House were filled with camaraderie, kinship and uproarious laughter.

As heartbreaking as his sudden passing is, I hope it will bring some measure of comfort to those who cherished him to know just how much he was living his dream every day. Very rarely in life do you get to be exactly where you want to be, when you want to be there, with who you want to be with, doing precisely what you want to do — that was every moment for Lindsey.

When President Trump won in Nov 2024, Lindsey was exultant. Elated. And determined. He couldn’t wait to spearhead work, as the Budget Chairman, on the reconciliation bill that would cement President Trump’s most important campaign promises. I’ll never forget the senate lunch, when a couple Senators were a tad off the program, and Lindsey — in his inimitable way — made sure everyone was onside by the time we left. It was a glorious thing to witness. He knew how to move a room.

Lindsey was a senator’s senator. The job was everything to him. Truly did he believe in the splendor of the office and the noble lineage behind it, of which he was the worthy heir.

He was a senator in the mold of those who fashioned the institution, someone who still had the ability, in a heated exchange, to use rhetorical power to change the course of events.

Which is why we will never forget his legendary Kavanaugh moment. We rarely think that we are out of time with our friends, so while there is a lot more I wish I could have said to Lindsey, I am glad that more than once I told him what that moment meant to the whole nation and why he was the only Senator who could have done it with such utter perfection.

Most importantly, I had the chance to tell him on many occasions what his friendship meant to me and to us all. There was never once a time he didn’t answer a phone call and lend whatever assistance was required. It was never a question with Lindsey. He believed deeply in the code of friendship and loyalty.

The fact that Lindsey started out as a political opponent only to become one the President’s most steadfast and faithful supporters underscores that Lindsey believed emphatically in the voice of the people.

There is a lot more I would like to say. His passing, at a time when he had never been more dynamic, is as unexpected as it is shocking. In many respects, Lindsey was the last of a breed of American Senator whose like we may not yet see again for a long time.

He lived every minute in the arena, a political gladiator to the very last.

More than anything now, our thoughts are with his Sister, nieces and loved ones.

We pray that God will ease their sorrow and heal their pain.

Lindsey can never be replaced and will never be forgotten.

Godspeed, my friend.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The governor of Oklahoma raises a glass of raw milk to a camera in 2026, takes a swig, and tells the state it tastes like freedom.

He had just signed a law lifting the cap on how much unpasteurised milk a farm can sell directly to the public, from a hundred gallons a month to fifteen hundred, and making it legal to advertise the stuff. Oklahoma is one of a run of states pulling raw milk back out of the shadows. And every time one does, the same warning goes up: this was banned for a reason, have you forgotten why.

So it is worth remembering exactly why. The real reason has been quietly mislaid.

In the growing American cities of the mid-1800s, milk became a genuine killer, and the reason was an industry. Distilleries producing whiskey had a hot, sour waste left over called swill, and someone worked out you could feed it to cows packed into sheds right next to the still. The animals lived in filth, diseased and dying on their feet, and gave a thin bluish milk so poor it was doctored with chalk, plaster and molasses just to pass for milk. This swill milk poured into the cities and killed infants by the thousand. That was the scandal that built the case for pasteurising milk and regulating dairies, and it was a fair case against that milk.

Here is the part that got quietly folded in. The same wave of law that rightly killed off the distillery-slop dairies also swept up the clean stuff: milk from healthy cows on grass, on small farms, drawn into clean pails. All of it got tarred with the swill-dairy brush and pushed toward the same ban. And once the big pasteurising plants and the consolidated dairies were built, keeping the small raw producer locked out stopped being about disease at all. It became about who was allowed to sell milk.

The filthy urban swill dairy vanished a century ago. The suspicion it earned got pinned, permanently, onto a farmer selling clean milk from healthy cows at his own gate.

They banned the milk of dying cows fed on distillery waste, which was right, and then kept the ban aimed at the farm down the lane, which was never the problem.

[The Real Mike Rowe @mikeroweworks]

Today’s guest was influenced in large part by his Mamaw, a devoted Christian woman with an unrepentant potty-mouth, and the bestselling memoir that made her, and him, famous. I'm reminded of the first saw him interviewed, shortly after the presidential election in 2016, by a panel of flabbergasted talking heads on CNN who were trying, desperately it seemed, to make sense of Trump’s unlikely victory.

As you might recall, most of the pollsters got that one wrong, and a lot of deeply confused journalists were wondering why Trump won in Ohio, and in many so other places where Hillary Clinton was expected to easily prevail. The author of Hillbilly Elegy offered a thoughtful explanation, which came down to the simple fact that a lot of Americans in a lot of flyover states felt overlooked and underserved and taken for granted by their elected officials. Coincidentally, around the same time, I was invited on to Meet the Press to answer the same question. Prior to the election, I had predicted that the outcome was going to be a lot closer than people thought, and Chuck Todd wanted to know if the men and women I’d highlighted on Dirty Jobs might have provided me with some unique insight.

After the interview, Kim Strossel – a reporter at the @WSJ who was also on the panel - asked me if I’d read Hillbilly Elegy or met the author.

“Not yet,” I said. “But I just saw him on @CNN and liked what he had to say.”

“There’s an obvious parallel,” she said. “You’ve gotten famous working alongside a lot of forgotten Americans, and he’s gotten famous writing about them. You two would probably have a lot to discuss.”

Ten years later, it seems that Kim was right. I do in fact, have a lot to discuss with the author of Hillbilly Elegy, including his latest bestseller, Communion, which he’s been writing for the last decade. I suspect he’d have published it sooner had he not been distracted with his run for the Ohio Senate and subsequent elevation to Vice President of the United States. But regardless, Communion is finally available, and @JDVance has dropped by to discuss it, along various matters of national importance.

Our whole conversation is here. https://t.co/KDReDQiX3h
Hopefully, Mamaw is watching…

[Raylan Givens @JewishWarrior13]

🚨Q: You were saying a month ago about the Iranians that they are rational people, and today you called them scum What changed?

Trump: "I got to know them."

Watch Rubio's smile...

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

Excellent 🧵

[Adam | Faithful Messenger @Adam_FaithfulM]

You've tried to change by sheer willpower.

Read the Bible more. Sin less. Try harder.

And it keeps failing because willpower was never designed to carry the weight of transformation.

Jesus pointed to something deeper in John 15.

And interestingly, what modern brain science observes about how habits form lines up with the pattern He described.

Not "science proves the Bible" but a striking overlap worth exploring. 🧵

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

I think I saw that episode on Dukes of Hazzard.

[Hank F in Akron 🏆🥇 @HankF330ToGo]

What the hell did we just witness???

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

God Bless America

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

@emilymiller I love them! Thank you ☺️ 🇺🇸 I had a bit of an obscured view from the harbor, but loved being here to see it in person. All of the video perspectives only add to the experience!

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

He gets it. ❤️🤍💙

[Gunther Eagleman™ @GuntherEagleman]

🚨🇺🇸 BEAUTIFUL MOMENT FOR AMERICA 250

U.S. Marine Corps Sergeant Diakaria Sangre received his American citizenship at Mount Vernon on the Fourth of July, the perfect day to officially join the greatest nation on Earth. (THE RIGHT WAY)

From serving in the Marines to becoming a full citizen on our 250th birthday… this is what the American dream looks like.

Welcome to the team, Sergeant. We’re proud and honored to have you. 🙏

H/T - IG Fox5DC

[Dr Jordan B Peterson @jordanbpeterson]

To the Americans:

I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States.

And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness:

You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence.

This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns.

Success is equated with exploitation.
Ambition is looked upon with contempt.

This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom.

But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated.

This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet.

And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America:

Thank God for the United States.

Thank God for the wisdom of its founders.
Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man.
Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners.

Long may your admirable country dominate the world.

Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states.

May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning.

Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill.

Thank God for the USA.

Happy 250th.

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

[Frank Turek @DrFrankTurek]

The Christian worldview is the only worldview that can justify and will maintain the human rights and freedoms upon which our nation was founded 250 years ago today. Islam won’t (sharia law), Hinduism won’t (caste system), Atheism won’t (no one is higher than the dictator, which led to 100 million murdered by atheistic regimes in the 20th Century).

Those other worldviews do not believe,“that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Our founders knew that rights can only come from God—not governments—but that good governments are supposed to secure those rights. That’s what Christianity teaches.

Reflecting back on the founding of our country, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1813, “The general Principles on which the Fathers achieved Independence, where the only Principles in which that beautiful Assembly of young Gentlemen could Unite. . . And what were these general Principles? I answer, the general Principles of Christianity. . . ”

So whether you are a Christian or not, you should appreciate the principles that come from Christianity, including inalienable rights, and that governments are temporary institutions that are to protect the lives and liberties of beings that are eternal and made in the image of God—you and me.

[Pam Mattoon @MattoonPam]

Very cool

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order.

The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River.

Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes.

Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin.

These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday.

So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both.

114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.