Artist, Appalachian Barn goddess G-d,Guns,Life,Classical Liberalism Scottish/Irish/Ashkenazi Jew🇺🇸"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge" Hosea 4:6
This is Father Bronislovas Paukštys of St. Michael the Archangel Church in Kaunas (Kovno-Slabodka), Lithuania.
During WWII Paukštys falsified and produced birth certificates and baptismal records for 120 Jewish children, saving those children's lives from certain death .
Paukštys also hid 25 Jews inside his parish and helped another 200 Jews escape certain death at the hands of the Germans, helping them find farms and safe houses where they could hide.
More than 95% of Lithuanian Jewry were murdered during the Holocaust.
We can never thank Father Paukštys and those who assisted him enough. He saved those people from certain death.
He was a true hero.
Entre el polvo, el silencio y la desesperación, una pequeña vida se aferraba a la esperanza.
Mientras los rescatistas buscaban sobrevivientes entre los escombros de un edificio colapsado en Venezuela, encontraron a un perrito atrapado. No ladraba, no lloraba, no tenía fuerzas para pedir ayuda. Pero cuando le acercaron agua, sus ojos brillaron de una manera imposible de olvidar, como si entendiera que alguien por fin había llegado por él.
Fue rescatado con vida y hoy se ha convertido en un símbolo de algo que nunca debemos olvidar: en medio de las tragedias más dolorosas, cada vida cuenta. Porque el sufrimiento no distingue especies, y la compasión sigue siendo una de las formas más hermosas de humanidad.
Wonder what the Left and Muslims have in common? Sexual perversion.
These Islamo-homos fit right in with “pride month.” They’ll beat their chests and then each other.
In 1979, radical leftists and Muslims who blended leftist ideas together overthrew the Iranian monarchy. The leftists had helped their oppressed Muslim brethren; Marx and Lenin, their inspiration, would have been proud.
Over the next decade, their oppressed Muslim brethren moved to consolidate power -- imprisoning, torturing, show-trialing, and executing 30,000 of the noble liberators.
The Muslim faction of the revolution proceeded to create one of the most hardline, oppressive Islamic theocracies in the Middle East -- one that would have made the monarchy that the leftists helped overthrow look like a liberal progressive utopia.
In Iran today, the memory of the noble liberators is suppressed. Family members who inquire can be subjected to imprisonment or worse. Of the memory that does persist, the noble liberators are regarded as godless traitors who deserved persecution.
Left-wing political parties are banned. Severe criminal penalties are imposed on those who espouse the ideas of the left-wing noble liberators, including imprisonment and death.
I posted about the HPV vaccine litigation and settlement. What I did not expect was the flood of messages from people saying, “This happened to me.”
Mothers. Fathers. Young women. Families asking where they can submit claims. People saying they believe Gardasil changed their health, their future, or their child’s life.
Are all of them wrong? Are they lying? Lots of coincidences? When this many people are saying, “Something happened to me,” maybe the answer should not be to mock them, dismiss them, or call them crazy.
Because the most heartbreaking part is not just the injuries people describe. It’s how many say they were never believed.
"God can't become a man."
That was one of my first objections as a Muslim.
I thought I was defending God's greatness.
In reality, I was limiting Him.
Think about it.
God can create a universe out of nothing.
Split the sea.
Raise the dead.
Form Adam from dust.
But becoming a man?
That's where we draw the line?
The issue was never that God couldn't do it.
The issue was that I couldn't accept that He loved us enough to.
Because if God became man, then He didn't stay distant.
He stepped into the dirt.
Into the suffering.
Into the blood.
That's not weakness.
That's authority wearing flesh.
That's glory with a heartbeat.
And when I finally cried out, "God, if You're real, show me who You are," I wasn't met by a God far away.
I met a Savior with scars.
A God holy enough to judge sin, yet loving enough to enter our world and carry it Himself.
Emmanuel doesn't mean "God far off."
It means "God with us."
And He is still alive.
Every word of Shelby Foote’s 1.5 million word Civil War epic was written longhand with a dip pen.
No typewriter. No computer. Definitely no AI.
He averaged 500 words a day. It took him twenty years.
Why the old-fashioned way?
“It helps me slow down,” he said.
History wasn’t typed, it was dipped into existence. One deliberate stroke at a time.
I have to admit. Years ago, I used to hate the guy.
How stupid and naive I was.
Now I’m a big fan of Bibi and his strength facing the armies of Radical Islam.
No capitulation, no appeasement, just strength.
An honest read on Custer has to separate two things that usually get mashed together: Custer the soldier in general, and Custer at the Little Bighorn specifically. They come out differently.
As a soldier in the Civil War, Custer was genuinely good, and the record backs it up. He went from lieutenant to brevet brigadier general at 23, one of the youngest in the Army. He led cavalry charges at Gettysburg, Yellow Tavern, and through the Shenandoah, and he won. His men took casualties, but he produced results in an arm of war, mounted cavalry, where boldness was often the correct instinct. He had real physical courage and a gift for the headlong attack. That part of the reputation was earned. He was not a fraud or a fool in the saddle.
The problem is that the qualities that made him effective in 1863 are close to the exact qualities that killed him in 1876. Aggression with good intelligence is decisive. Aggression with bad intelligence is suicide. At the Little Bighorn his instincts ran on autopilot and the situation called for the opposite. His own scouts, the people most expert in reading that country, told him plainly the village was the largest they had ever seen and that he did not have enough men or ammunition. He brushed it aside. His single fear was that the camp would escape, when in reality the camp was strong enough that escaping was the last thing on its mind.
Then he made the decisions that actually lost the battle. Splitting a regiment of roughly 600 into three separated wings in front of a force that outnumbered him several to one meant none of the pieces could support the others in time, and that is precisely how they were destroyed in detail. He attacked in the heat of the afternoon without rest or reconnaissance, without waiting for the coordinated movement that was the entire point of the larger campaign. He did not know Crook had already been fought to a halt at the Rosebud a week earlier, but that is partly the point: he chose to attack blind rather than develop the situation. Defenders of Custer argue the camp really might have scattered and that breaking up the regiment was standard cavalry doctrine for pinning a fleeing village. There is something to that. But doctrine assumes you have a rough idea of what you are hitting, and he had been told and chose not to believe it.
So the narrow military verdict is not really in dispute among serious historians. The Last Stand was a defeat produced by overconfidence and contempt for the enemy's strength, and Custer bears the primary responsibility because the fatal calls were his. The forensic archaeology even punctured the heroic image of the fight itself. The cartridge evidence points to a command that started with disciplined volleys and then came apart into a rout, not a defiant ring of men selling their lives in good order. The painting on the saloon wall is mostly invention.
His afterlife as a martyr is its own distortion, and worth flagging because it shapes how people still picture him. The news landing during the 1876 Centennial turned the defeat into a story of noble sacrifice, and his widow Libbie spent the next 57 years polishing that version until it hardened into national myth. The hero of that myth and the commander who actually made the decisions on June 25 are not the same man.
So the fair summary is something like this. Custer was a brave and capable cavalry officer whose recklessness and arrogance got himself and over 200 of his men killed in a fight he badly misjudged. The men who beat him were better led that day. He was neither the hero of the myth nor a cartoon incompetent. He was a talented, vain, aggressive commander who walked into a disaster he was repeatedly warned about, and the warning he ignored is the most damning fact in the whole story.
Score for the dog! Yesterday I took Ronen for a walk and stopped at our turnaround spot outside a new home construction. I asked a worker there if they had any pallets that I could take off their hands, thinking I could come back with the car. He said sure, there should be one free in a couple days. Then I spotted this 👇baby pallet! It is the perfect size and height for the exercises he needs to do now. It can also layer atop a larger pallet for the more advanced exercises he’ll soon be ready for. It’s super sturdy and well made. I carried it home 💕
Robert Adler, an Austrian-born Jewish physicist and Holocaust survivor, invented the Zenith Space Command in 1956. Becoming the standard TV wireless remote control.