Rick Hedin

I do not subscribe

The purpose of life is to participate in God’s story as well as you can

[Brooke @buckeyebettie]

A Parental Alienation Story.

A woman got pregnant.
A woman and a man got married.
One year later, the woman divorced the man.

The woman got full custody and child support.
The man continued his career in the US Navy.
The woman re-married.

The daughter grew up with a mother and stepfather who heavily abused her, both physically and emotionally.
The mother fed the daughter horrible, fictional stories about her biological father.
This was the daughter’s entire world.

Then, the daughter turned 12.

She was playing Nintendo in her bedroom when her mother told her someone was in the living room.
It was a man.
"Do you know who this is?" the mother asked.
"No," the daughter said.
"This is your father."

The father was ecstatic to see his daughter.
The daughter just felt awkward.

The father tried to visit again.
The daughter got her hopes up—but the father never showed.
The daughter became deeply sad. Then, she became angry.

She carried that anger all the way through college graduation.
Once she graduated, the father was finally able to contact her without legal restrictions.
The truth came out.

He hadn't abandoned her. The mother had blocked every single visit, cutting him off completely while keeping the daughter in the dark.

That was the moment the lies unraveled.
The daughter went completely no-contact with her mother.

Instead, she rebuilt a relationship with her father.
The relationship flourished.

The daughter got married.
The daughter had her own child—a little girl.
The grandfather stepped into his role seamlessly, building a beautiful bond with his granddaughter and son-in-law.

A fragmented past turned into a beautiful, growing clan.
Now, the daughter, her husband, and her child are moving across the country to live with the father.

For the first time in her 45 years of life, the daughter will finally get to live with her father.

The daughter is me. The father is my dad.

[AwakenedOutlaw⚒️ @AwakenedOutlaw]

I don't often mention my own physical challenges, but if any of you decide to drop me a little prayer this morning, I'd appreciate it.

Due to numerous (more than 10) concussions, I have been presenting with abnormal balance and memory issues for which I am doing physical therapy. These head injuries (some of them decidedly worse than others) have been a result of playing sports (football), military service, and general life accidents that appear to be catching up to me.

As such, I am heading in shortly for my second annual MRI to track my grey matter in relation to the possibility that I'm suffering from the onset of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), caused by repeated head injuries. It's the same degenerative brain disease that you've probably heard of regarding boxing, football, and hockey.

There is no cure for it, and it can only be 100% confirmed via autopsy after the fact, but I am showing early signs indicative of it... and yes, that's a little scary.

[Benny Johnson @bennyjohnson]

Losing our child this year was the most painful experience of our lives.

Walking into an ultrasound just to find our baby had already with Jesus.

Kate, your faith and strength through this has been a light for our family — and now for so many others.

Life is precious. Every heartbeat, every child, no matter the diagnosis or the challenges ahead. I would have given anything to keep fighting for that little one too…

Thank you for loving our four babies so fiercely and for honoring our precious angel in Heaven right now.

We’ll see you again one day, sweet baby. Until then, we will keep choosing life and trusting God’s plan, as He is the author of life and death.

Kate, I love you more than ever. ❤️

[Rick Hedin @RickHedin]

@SamaHoole Ha ha ha!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The only chicken breast recipe you'll ever need. Save this.

1. Source one corn-fed, free-range breast.
2. Brine overnight in filtered water with a bruised bay leaf.
3. Vacuum-seal with thyme and a knob of cultured butter.
4. Sous vide at 62C for ninety minutes.
5. Pat it bone dry. Moisture is the enemy of the sear, and the sear is everything.
6. Sear in foaming butter, ninety seconds a side, basting like your life depends on it.
7. Rest under foil. Plate with a smear of pea puree and three drops of jus.
8. Bin it.
9. Eat a steak.

Four hours, forty quid of kit and the entire spice rack, all to make a bird taste faintly of the butter. Or you could have the thing that was already delicious before you got anywhere near it.

[Nature 🦜and Music 🎶 @GuGi263]

when your 18 year old once water loving sprocker who is part blind, has arthritis and doggy dementia wonts to stay out in the pouring rain splashing around 🥹... its like watching him be a puppy again...

[Rick Hedin @RickHedin]

@RealShahriqKhan This reminds me of the vote in Los Angeles. “They didn’t prove wrong-doing. They just pointed out that it was arranged so it was impossible to prove wrong-doing.”

[Shahriq Khan @RealShahriqKhan]

As an Ex-Muslim, let me fill you in on something most Christians won’t ever know:

There are archaeological sites across Saudi Arabia that researchers aren't allowed to excavate.

No public digs or major investigations allowed. No open examination.

If those sites contain ancient synagogues, churches, or Torah manuscripts, they could answer one of the biggest questions in Islamic apologetics:

What Torah did Muhammad believe existed?

If archaeologists uncover Torah scrolls that match the same Torah found in places like Egypt, Ethiopia, and beyond, then the claim that a different Torah existed in Muhammad's day becomes much harder to defend.

Islam's criticism of the Torah often depends on the idea that the original message was altered. But where is the manuscript evidence?

Where is the lost Torah that supports the Islamic retelling of the prophets?

If the evidence is there, let's examine it and if the Torah is corrupted, prove it.

If Islam is true, it has nothing to fear from archaeology.

Truth doesn't hide from evidence. Truth invites investigation. So open the sites. Open the digs. Let the evidence speak for itself.

Until then, the unanswered questions remain.

[Amy Reichert @amyforsandiego]

Multiple Spencer Pratt voters have contacted me saying their signatures were rejected and their ballots were not counted. Here is the letter they get.

More than 200,000 Californians have had their ballots rejected since 2020. This is what happens when you don’t require voter ID. If a machine can identify your party registration, people have every right to question whether the process can be manipulated.

[Rick Hedin @RickHedin]

@LizzyStarrrdust @GlennAndTonic I like “Chet.”

In a movie, Samuel “L” Jackson adopts it as his snotty butler name.

[Rick Hedin @RickHedin]

@teachrobotslove Lewis: It’s waking that understands sleep, and not sleep that understands waking.

[Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove]

The myth of the tortured artist needs to die.

Writers are lying to themselves when they say their pain is necessary for inspiration, that peace and contentedness create fallow and dull periods of work. It's the whole "You can only write when you're single... log off Twitter once you become a wife," thing.

They believe that happiness is dullness. But that's only because they've trained themselves to use pain as inspirational fuel, and think they need it because the sharpness of it feels important.

It's a convenient excuse to self sabotage. It's a way to sustain the loop of self aggrandizing suffering, and never truly change.

If a writer never breaks this cycle, they might never realize that the problem with pain as fuel is that it's limiting. Pain is navel gazing. It tells you that it's the only important thing in the world, and ignores the entire broadband of human experience and emotion.

It forces a person to look inward and ignore the rest of the world, and as a result everything they write to justify pain will always make them a little less of a writer than you could be.

It's possible to write about pain and suffering without being stuck in it. Once you're not flailing in pain, you can actually see it with much more complexity and depth. Once you expand your happiness and curiosity and warmth and love, your knowledge of other emotions will expand too.

[The Night Warrior @WarriorNight007]

Life of the rejected and rescued baby cow 'Abby'

[David Asman @DavidAsmanfox]

As someone who covered the region for a dozen years for the WSJ, and reported in astonishment how even under conservative Pres Ronald Reagan USAID was funding socialist projects in Latin America, I can assure you that this is 💯 accurate.

[Saganism @Saganismm]

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.” Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. . . I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle—but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask. “Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely.

“I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.” You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints. “Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. “Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. “Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” . . . Now, what is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?

If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.”

— Carl Sagan

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Overheard at the Bell, a Thursday, the regulars three deep at the bar and the talk, as it increasingly is, about the animals.

"You'll have heard Dave's goat got into the churchyard again."

"He did the east section. Vicar's delighted. Saved the PCC a fortune."

"My niece follows it all on her phone. Knows more about that bull in Herefordshire than she does about her own family."

"There's a calf now, in Wales. A bison. First in six thousand years, they reckon."

"Get away."

"It's true. Ginger thing. She showed me. I'll be honest with you, I had a look at it for longer than I'd admit to."

The landlord, drawing a pint, not looking up: "We've all had a look. Don't pretend you haven't, Trevor."

A silence, of the comfortable kind.

"Funny, isn't it. Half the telly telling us the farming's killing the planet, and then you see the goat clearing the churchyard and the old boy's bull with his wildflowers, and you think, well, that doesn't look like it's killing anything."

"It's not killing anything. It's the only thing round here that's doing any good."

"To the goat, then."

"To the goat."

And they drank to a goat in Devon that none of them have met, in a pub in a different county, because the thing about these animals is that they have stopped being somebody's livestock and started being something a village holds in common, a shared good, a piece of news that is, for once, not bad.

The landlord rang the bell for last orders.

Nobody mentioned the goat had a name. They all knew it. You do not need to say Keith's name at the Bell. Everyone has already had a look.

[Russ 🇺🇸 🦅 @SoCalRuss1983]

Today I received a letter, just like my neighbor did, informing me that my California ballot was not counted because my "signature verification" supposedly didn't match the state's records. I've been voting in California for 20 years.

[fetty. @fettyfilm]

Father Stretch My Hands 😮‍💨🔥

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The cheapest, most effective wildfire crew in California has four legs and eats the problem.

Clearing flammable brush off a steep slope by hand is brutal, slow, expensive work. A herd of goats is none of those things.

Hand clearance:

- Around 28,000 dollars an acre
- People with tools on dangerous slopes
- Cuttings that then have to be hauled away

A herd of goats:

- Roughly 500 to 1,000 dollars an acre
- Climbs slopes no crew wants to touch
- Eats the brush to a firebreak and fertilises the ground on the way through
- Reaches branches several feet up
- Visibly thrilled to be at work

Calling the goat a quaint throwback has it backwards. On this job the goat is the superior technology by a factor of about fifty, and it runs on the very scrub everyone else is paying to remove.

[Milei in English - Official Account @jmilei_english]

For the first time in 123 years, Argentina has achieved a sustained fiscal surplus without being in default. We are one of only 5 countries in the world in this position.

LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT...!!!