MuseumTwenty

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

Everybody knows Robert E. Lee. Almost nobody knows his father was a fugitive who fled the country to escape his own creditors.

His dad was Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee III, and at one point he was one of the most famous men in America. A dashing cavalry commander in the Revolution. A personal friend of George Washington. Governor of Virginia. When Washington died, it was Harry Lee who stood up and called him "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." That line is still quoted 200 years later.

Then it all fell apart.

Harry got greedy. He poured everything he had into wild land speculation schemes, buying up huge tracts on credit and dreaming of cities that never got built. The debts piled into the tens of thousands. In 1809 he declared bankruptcy and got locked in a debtors prison, where he passed the time writing his war memoirs.

It got worse. In 1812 he traveled to Baltimore to defend a friend's newspaper from an angry mob. The mob broke in and beat him nearly to death. They sliced his face open and tried to gouge out his eyes. He never fully recovered, in body or mind.

So in 1813, broken and still hounded by the people he owed, he did the only thing left. He got on a boat and sailed to the West Indies, leaving his family behind. He drifted around the Caribbean for years writing letters home. In 1818, knowing he was dying, he tried to sail back to Virginia. He only made it as far as an island off the coast of Georgia, where he died among strangers and was buried far from home.

His son Robert was 6 years old when he left. Robert would spend the rest of his life trying to be everything his father was not: disciplined, careful, in control, a man who paid his debts.

The most famous soldier in American history grew up in the shadow of a war hero who died a wanted man.

[Dr. Maalouf ‏ @realMaalouf]

The Sao Lazaro Cross in Portugal was built in 1386 and stood for centuries. Until it was destroyed by Muslim immigrants!

[Handre @Handre]

Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.

The argument was precise. Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree.

This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it. Oskar Lange tried in 1936, proposing that socialist planners could simulate prices by trial and error. Mises read this and was unimpressed (charitably put). Lange assumed you could reproduce the function of market prices without the institution that generates them: private property, genuine exchange, real skin in the game. You cannot fake the signal and expect accurate information.

The Soviet Union spent seventy years proving Mises right. Chronic shortages, misallocated steel, surplus winter boots in Georgia in July, famine engineered by committees convinced they understood grain supply better than the price system. The USSR collapsed in 1991 under the weight of precisely the inefficiencies Mises predicted in Vienna in 1920.

You are watching this play out again today, every time a government sets energy prices, rent ceilings, or pharmaceutical price caps, and then expresses shock at the resulting shortages. The calculation problem did not expire with the Soviet Union. Bureaucrats who override price signals recreate the same blindness Mises identified. Mises told you exactly what would happen.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Ground beef in an American supermarket is now legally allowed to be part mushroom, and you will not find that on the front of the pack.

The blend is roughly seventy beef, thirty fungus. Some versions run pea protein instead, or alongside. The mushroom is chopped fine, hydrated, and mixed through the trim until the texture and the colour match, and it matches well, because that is the entire engineering problem and it was solved years ago. It goes in the same tray. It sits in the same case. It carries a leaf and a word like blended, and blended is doing a great deal of work.

Ground beef passed six dollars a pound in June for the first time on record. Beef and veal are forecast up 10.7 percent this year. The US cattle herd is at its lowest level in over seventy years and nobody expects relief before 2028. Ground beef is close to 48 percent of all the beef Americans eat.

So the chains had two options. Charge what the beef costs and watch the shopper reach for chicken. Or cut it with something that costs a fraction of it, hold the shelf price, and keep the item in the basket.

They went into the grinder because the grinder is the one place the eye cannot audit. A ribeye declares itself. Grain, marbling, fat cap, all of it visible, and nobody has ever tried to put a mushroom in one because you would find it in a second. Grind the same animal and the evidence disappears. Every food fraud in the record has gone the same route: the sausage, the pie, the patty, the ready meal. Horse turned up in mince and lasagne in 2013 and never once in a joint.

The cruelty of the timing is that American ground beef should be the best it has been in fifty years. Cattle are being fed to record weights, an average of 1,475 pounds live in March, because heavier animals are the only way to hold production up with fewer head. Heavier cattle carry more fat. More fat means richer trim going into the grinder.

The product was improving at the exact moment they started diluting it.

And swap out that thirty percent and look at what leaves. Thirty percent less B12, less heme iron, less zinc, less complete protein, replaced by water bound into fungal fibre. You are buying the same weight and taking home less food.

The blend was designed when beef was cheap and it was sold then as a choice for the planet. It is landing now because beef is dear, and not one word on the front of the pack has changed. The justification moved with the price, which tells you what the justification was.

Ground beef was the last part of the animal a family could still afford whole.

That is exactly why it went first.

[U.S. Embassy Australia @USEmbAustralia]

Congratulations on your confirmation, Ambassador David Brat! We are so excited to welcome you and your family to Australia. Can’t wait to work with you as our long-standing and enduring U.S.-Australia Alliance flourishes under your leadership.

[John M. Cameron @johnrockshomes]

I am a J6er.

The tragedy of January 6th wasn’t the broken windows.

It was the 1,600 Americans hunted, caged, and destroyed for protesting a stolen election.

It was fathers torn from their kids.
Mothers sentenced for walking through open doors.

Veterans locked in solitary.

Businesses wiped out.

Marriages destroyed.

Men who contemplated suicide because the government decided their voices were the real crime.

I spent 22 minutes inside. No violence. No destruction. Just a dad in a “Count ALL Legal Votes” shirt who refused to stay silent.
For that they took my freedom, my family, my livelihood, and tried to take my mind.

Cities burned for months in 2020 and the same people who called it a “summer of love” called us terrorists.

That is the tragedy.

Not the day itself.
What they did to the people who showed up and walked thru open doors.

God Bless the J6ers.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

🚨Official Fundraiser for the In-N-Out HERO Who Confronted a Mass Shooter and Saved Lives

He Needs Us Now…

Austin and his wife were sitting in the drive thru when gunfire rang out.

Immediately, Austin told his wife to stay in the car and ran toward the gunfire.

Austin came FACE to FACE with the mass shooter and confronted him as the gunman fired and others escaped.

Austin is now fighting for his life.

Please help this hero who was willing to sacrifice his life so that others could escape with theirs.

This is his official GiveSendGo set up by his wife.

Your donation will help cover lost wages, medical expenses, rehab, rehabilitation, travel to appointments, and everyday household expenses.

Let’s show Austin and his family that we appreciate real heroes who stand up to evil.

Let’s show the world that Americans stand together against evil 🇺🇸

https://t.co/98Cg6VMt9Y

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

On the black, moonless night of August 2, 1943, a Japanese destroyer came out of the dark at forty knots and cut a small American torpedo boat clean in half. Most of the story you might know ends there. The real story, the part that reveals the man, is the five days that came after, and the twenty six year old lieutenant at the center of it was named John F. Kennedy.

First, how it happened, because it was a mess. That night fifteen American PT boats had been sent into the Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands to ambush the Tokyo Express, the Japanese convoys running troops and supplies down the slot. It went badly. The boats were poorly coordinated, radio discipline was weak, and they fired around thirty torpedoes in the confusion without scoring a single hit. As the action fizzled, Kennedy's boat, PT-109, was idling quietly on one engine to keep her wake and noise down, drifting in the dark strait.

That caution may have doomed her. On one engine she was slow and hard to maneuver. Out of the blackness the Japanese destroyer Amagiri suddenly loomed up, bearing straight down on the little boat. There was almost no time to react. The destroyer rammed PT-109 at full speed and sheared her in two, and her aviation fuel ignited, throwing burning gasoline across the water. Two of the crew, Andrew Kirksey and Harold Marney, were killed instantly. The eleven others were flung into the sea, some swimming through flames, one of them, engineer Patrick McMahon, horribly burned over much of his body.

The survivors dragged themselves back to the floating front half of the hull and clung to it through the rest of the night, hoping the other PT boats would come back for them. None did. Everyone had assumed PT-109 was simply gone, all hands lost. Nobody was coming.

By the next day the wrecked bow was slowly rolling over and would not float much longer. Kennedy made the decision to abandon it and swim for a distant scrap of an island, a tiny uninhabited dot small enough that the Japanese were unlikely to be on it, but it was around three and a half miles away across open water. And they had a badly burned man who could not swim.

This is the part that became legend, and unlike a lot of war legends, it is true and well documented. Kennedy, who had a genuinely bad back and had been thrown hard in the collision, took the long strap of McMahon's life jacket, clamped it between his teeth, and swam breaststroke for hours, towing the wounded man behind him the entire way. The other men kicked along beside a wooden plank from the wreck. It took the group four or five grueling hours in the water. Kennedy never let go of that strap.

They reached the island, later nicknamed Kennedy Island, exhausted and with nothing. No food, no fresh water, just a few coconuts. And Kennedy did not sit and wait to be found. Nearly every night he swam back out alone into Ferguson Passage, into the very waters where enemy ships moved, holding a lantern, trying to flag down a passing American PT boat. Night after night, nothing came, and he swam back to the island half dead with fatigue, at one point swept off course by the current and barely making it back.

They eventually moved to other small islands, Olasana and then Naru, searching for food and a way out. On Naru they found a small Japanese supply crate, some hard candy inside, and a one man dugout canoe. And then came the human turning point. Two Solomon Islander scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, working secretly for the Allies, came paddling by in a canoe and found the ragged castaways. Their help would save the whole crew.

There was no paper to send a message. So Kennedy picked up a coconut, and with a knife he scratched words into the husk. It read, in the clipped shorthand of a desperate man, Nauro Island, native knows position, he can pilot, eleven alive, need small boat, Kennedy. He handed that coconut to Gasa and Kumana, and the two scouts paddled roughly forty miles through Japanese controlled waters to carry it to an Australian coastwatcher hiding in the jungle, Lieutenant Reginald Evans.

The message got through. Arrangements were made, the scouts guided rescuers back, and on August 8, six days after the destroyer split their boat in two, Kennedy and his ten surviving men were finally pulled out. Kennedy had brought all of them home except the two killed in the first instant of the collision.

He received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his heroism and a Purple Heart for his injuries, and the whole saga made him famous. Years later, with the dry humor that people loved in him, he was asked how he became a war hero. He answered, it was easy, they sank my boat.

But he clearly knew it was more than that. When John F. Kennedy became President of the United States, that scratched coconut shell, the one that carried eleven men's lives to safety, sat encased in plastic on his desk in the Oval Office. Of all the objects a president could keep in front of him, he chose the reminder of the night his command was destroyed and the days he spent refusing to lose anyone else.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

People know Robert E. Lee as the Confederate general. Almost nobody knows the 30 years that came before, and it's a wild resume.

He shows up at West Point in 1825 and graduates 2nd in his class of 46 with zero demerits in four years. Not one. That basically never happens.

Then the Army makes him an engineer. In the late 1830s the Mississippi River was shifting course and threatening to strand the St. Louis harbor on dry land. They send a young Lee. He builds a system of dikes to force the river to scour its own channel, and he saves the port. The city that would later sit in a war he fought against owed its harbor to him.

The Mexican War is where he becomes a legend. He isn't leading charges, he's the guy crawling on his stomach through lava fields and enemy lines to find the paths nobody else can find. At Cerro Gordo he scouts a route around the Mexican flank that wins the battle. Winfield Scott, the top general in the country, flat out called him "the very best soldier I ever saw in the field."

He runs West Point as superintendent. He chases Comanches in Texas with the cavalry. And in 1859 when John Brown seizes the arsenal at Harpers Ferry, the officer the government sends to end it is Lee. He takes it back in under three minutes.

Then in 1861 Lincoln's people offer him command of the entire Union army. He turns it down and goes home to Virginia. History remembers the choice. It forgets the man they were fighting so hard to keep.

[The Conservative Alternative @OldeWorldOrder]

RUSH LIMBAUGH: "Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare.

Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it."

[Amy Mek @AmyMek]

Please everyone stop what you are doing for a moment and pray for Kaylie 🙏🏻❤️

[Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives @dom_lucre]

🔥🚨BREAKING: Retired 82-year-old Colonel grandmother was k*lled by an illegal Venezuelan migrant while walking on a Publix crosswalk in Panama City Beach Florida.

Deborah Murphy, an 82-year-old grandmother and wife of a retired Air Force Colonel, was walking through a crosswalk outside a Publix in Panama City Beach when she was struck and run over by a Toyota 4Runner.

The driver, Carlos Suarez-Contreras, 26, and passenger Luis Sanabria, 29, were both determined to be in the country illegally from Venezuela. ICE detainers were issued for both men. Suarez-Contreras is held without bond and is set for arraignment

She was on a CROSSWALK. This is what open borders cost.

[Baseball by BSmile @BSmile]

Amazing footage of the Grand Opening of The #Baseball Hall of Fame in #Cooperstown, NY! (1939)⚾️ #HOF #MLB #HOFWKND #History

[Bannon’s WarRoom @Bannons_WarRoom]

We are heartbroken to learn that Sam Faddis passed away last night.

Sam was a patriot, a fearless truth teller, and a beloved member of the WarRoom family. Please keep Gina, his children, and the entire Faddis family in your prayers.

Rest in peace, Sam.

[Amy Mek @AmyMek]

Islam is just Islam.

There is no such thing as “Islamism.”

That word is a modern academic invention, a linguistic shield created in the late 1970s and pushed into Western policy to create a fake separation between Islam and the political, supremacist, and militant commands that have defined it for 1,400 years.

The Quran.
The Hadith.
The Sunnah.
The example of Muhammad.

These are not “extremist interpretations.”
They are the source.
Jihad until dominance.
Sharia as law.
Death for apostasy.
Subjugation of non-believers.

These are not fringe ideas.

They are core doctrine, taught, practiced, and defended across centuries and still supported by large majorities in Muslim-majority countries today.

We don’t invent “communism-ism” to protect communism from its body count.

We don’t invent “fascism-ism” to protect fascism from its crimes.

Yet with Islam, the West was trained to play word games so it could never name the threat.

That is why security agencies were ordered to scrub doctrine from threat assessments.

That is why “known wolves” kept slipping through.

That is why an imam can openly defend crushing homosexuals under a wall in the name of Allah and face no consequences — while anyone who points to the texts is labeled the problem.

Reform?

The Quran itself forbids it.

Those who try are declared apostates.

Stop the euphemisms.

Stop the self-deception.

Islam is just Islam.

And the West will keep losing until it has the courage to say so.

Read our latest: https://t.co/ox5HJ9M1t4

[John “TIG” Tiegen @TigTiegen]

Reposting this because it’s the truth.
We knew it that night saving the DS agents and recovering Sean Smith’s body. We knew it in Tripoli at the CIA compound. We knew it in Germany. We knew it at Langley.
Hillary knew it on 9/12 too she told the Egyptian Prime Minister it was a planned attack, not the film, and linked to al-Qaeda.
Days later the public got the spontaneous video protest talking points instead. The media ran with it like it was gospel.
But they knew. We knew. The difference is we lived it and got attacked for telling the truth.
Always Move Forward
Semper Fi.

[The Appalachian Podcast @GetOnTap]

Y’all pray for our friends in West Virginia, and be ready to help in any way you can when the dust settles, or sooner.

Whether it be donating, being on the ground, sharing information, every bit helps and people will appreciate it.

[Brick Suit @Brick_Suit]

Route 66 Centennial Roadtrip
Outdoor neon sign park
St. Robert, Missouri

A very cool collection of vintage neon signs is on display at a public park in St. Robert and they come alive every night.

Fantastic that these were saved

[Michael Lucci @Michael7ucci]

CONGRATULATIONS to Great Britain's Josh Kerr on setting a new 1 mile world record in London today!

Kerr's 3:42.66 record broke Hicham El Guerrouj's 27 year old record.

[David J Harris Jr @DavidJHarrisJr]

This is Matthew Ayegra.

11 years ago, he was murdered by Islamic extremists along with 20 others.

He wasn’t a Christian when he was captured.

But after seeing the faith and courage of other captives refusing to deny Christ, when he was asked to renounce Him he reportedly said, “Their God is my God.”