TxAgAdam87

A&M 87. 3 sons: A&M 16, US Navy, A&M 12/Cornell 18. Actuary. 1/2 marathoner & sprint triathlete. Spurs, Rangers, Cowboys, Stars. Economic Liberty. A is A.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

This took guts.
And immense vocal talent.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

An apt day to remember that Dolly Parton once recorded a cover of Stairway to Heaven - and, in defiance of every moral law in the universe, she absolutely owned it.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

I hope every word of every sentence of this post is true.

I expect it to be so.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy.

She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid.

The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%.

She handed out the checks herself.

In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college.

When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months.

You've probably heard that part.

Here's the part you haven't:

The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top.

Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave.

She built her county an entire hospital.

She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it.

In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees.

Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal.

In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release.

And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it.

She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway.

She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did.

Rest in Peace, Dolly ��🇸

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@B1G_Ryan Mike Elko doesn’t call (offense) plays for A&M

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@JoshuaBarzon Thank God I live in TX.
HEB is the best. 👍🏼

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@catholicbob Becoming an electrician (and likely earning money while doing it) with zero student debt puts one in a better position for a productive, functional life than spending 4 years unpaid to get a bachelor’s in I’m A Victim Studies with a 6 figure pile of student debt you can’t pay off

[Sharyl Attkisson ���️‍♂️💼🥋 @SharylAttkisson]

Sometimes, I think we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Medical Establishment: We’ve never had better tools to help treat cancer!
Me: That’s great. But why do are so many people getting cancer?

Medical Establishment: There are amazing medicines to treat the millions with immune disorders!
Me: Terrific. But why do so many people have immune disorders?

Medical Establishment: There are new and better treatments for so many mental illnesses today!
Me: Okay, but why do so many people have mental illness?

Medical Establishment: We’re learning some of the secrets to correcting metabolic disorders!
Me: Good news. But why do so many people have metabolic disorders?

Medical Establishment: We’re cracking the code to help fix gut health!
Me: Important. But why are so many people’s guts messed up?

Medical Establishment: We’re devoting more resources than ever to figuring out how to mitigate side effects from treatments for trans people!
Me: Bravo. But why do so many girls say they’re boys, and boys say they’re girls?

Medical Establishment: We’ve made great strides in acceptance of obese people.
Me: Cool. But shouldn’t we tackle the issues making so many Americans overweight?

Medical Establishment: We have great options for injections for people who can’t absorb B12 and Vitamin D!
Me: Nice. But why are so many people not able to absorb B12 and Vitamin D?

Medical Establishment: We’re figuring out what diet and therapies really work for autistic kids.
Me: Yeah— but why do so many kids have autism?

What if we really studied and addressed root causes and it ended up solving a lot of these same issues?

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

Worth reading.
And rereading.

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

I endorse this message.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@ChiefEngineerCE TX Dept of Transportion, salvaging highway signage for reuse.
If it were my aim to eliminate the first job opportunities for students, I would raise the minimum wage.
In low min wage states (TX), kids can still get jobs in grocery stores. HEB was great for my sons.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

This man GETS it.
Outstanding.

[the Sports ON Tap @thesportsontap]

Logan Ryan says he made close to $80 million in the NFL and never spent a dollar of his salary.

Not a car. Not a house. Not one paycheck.

He retired at 33 and lives entirely off what his investments pay him.

He posted the whole thing himself this week, and it's the best financial advice any athlete has given in years.

First, who he is.

Logan Ryan was not a superstar. He grew up in Berlin, New Jersey, played at Rutgers, and went in the THIRD round to New England in 2013. Eighty third overall.

He never made a Pro Bowl in eleven seasons.

What he did do was last. Patriots, Titans, Giants, Buccaneers, 49ers. 755 tackles, 19 interceptions, 15 forced fumbles, 13 sacks.

And two Super Bowl rings.

Here's the mindset, in his own words.

He points out that he was the 14th cornerback taken in his draft class, and says that chip never left him.

"It made me suspicious of any dollar that felt too easy to spend. So I never touched the paychecks."

So how does a man live for eleven years without spending his salary?

He built a portfolio and lived off what it produced. Commercial real estate. Private credit. And notably, he got into OpenAI early, while he was still lining up at corner on Sundays.

He also lives beneath his means on purpose. His words: he doesn't fly private, and he still doesn't wear the heavy jewelry.

And he says he asks his financial advisor more questions than any other client on the man's books.

Now the part that matters most, and it's the reason he wrote any of this.

"Most guys who hit that number are broke a few years after their last check. I've watched it happen up close."

That's not a hypothetical for him. He spent eleven years in locker rooms watching teammates get life changing money and lose all of it within a few years of their last game.

His actual thesis is one sentence, and it flips how most people think about a big contract.

"Chasing a big number was never the point. What actually bought my freedom was saving relentlessly, year after year, while everyone around me spent."

The number was never the win. The saving was.

And here's what freedom actually meant to him: "I retired at 33 and answered to no schedule but my kids'."

One more thing worth knowing, because this isn't a story about hoarding money.

In 2017, right after signing a three year, $30 million deal with Tennessee, Logan Ryan surprised his older brother.

His brother had gotten into Drexel, graduated with honors, and was working as an engineer, and was still buried in student loan debt.

Logan handed him a check for $82,000 and wiped it out.

His comment at the time was that the system is broken and makes no sense, and that he was fortunate enough to be able to take care of it.

He didn't spend his money on himself.

He spent it on being done working at 33 with his kids and his brother taken care of.

For more stories like this, follow us on any platform @thesportsontap

[Handre @Handre]

Hayek and Keynes met in person, debated in print, and disagreed on nearly everything that matters in economics, and the consequences of that disagreement are still bleeding out of your tax bill today.

The clash crystallized in 1931. Hayek arrived at the London School of Economics from Vienna, the University of London had just given him a visiting position, and his four-part review of Keynes's Treatise on Money appeared in Economica. Keynes fired back. Both men were brilliant, both were prolific, and both understood that they were fighting over something fundamental: whether market prices carry real information, or whether a wise technocrat with a budget deficit can simply override them. Hayek said prices are signals produced by millions of individual decisions that no single mind can replicate. Keynes said the economy is a machine and the state can tune the throttle. One of these positions respects human knowledge. The other assumes the government knows your business better than you do.

The irony Keynes fans never want to confront: Keynes himself, by 1946, was alarmed at where Keynesian policy was heading. He told Henry Clay at the Bank of England that he hoped markets would reassert themselves before his own ideas "did too much damage." He died that April. His followers immediately ignored the warning and spent the next three decades engineering the stagflation of the 1970s, the Nixon wage-price controls of 1971, and the general wreckage that Hayek had predicted with embarrassing precision in 1931.

Hayek won the Nobel in 1974. The prize committee gave it to him alongside Gunnar Myrdal, a committed social democrat, because they lacked the nerve to award a free market thinker alone. Even in Stockholm, the state needs a security blanket.

The deeper issue is moral, not just technical. Every time a government "stimulates" the economy, it does so by extracting resources from producers through taxation or debasing the currency through credit expansion. The state is not a benevolent engineer: it is an institution that compels compliance at gunpoint, then calls the wealth they exctacted "revenue." The pretense of knowledge is not merely an intellectual error, but the philosophical license for coercion. Every stimulus package passed since 2008 proves the lesson is still being refused.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@grok confirmed.
Outstanding work by this young man.
Adversity reveals character 👍🏼

[A Gene Robinson @AlGeneRobi96834]

🚨 THIS YOUNG MAN IS A HERO.

Fourteen-year-old Acie Holland III was riding home from school, looking at his phone, when something felt wrong.

The bus had passed his stop.

Then it began accelerating.

Acie looked toward the front and saw the driver unconscious over the steering wheel. The moving bus, carrying 14 students, was drifting across the centerline toward oncoming traffic.

Acie did not scream.

He did not freeze.

He did not wait for an adult to save them.

This eighth grader ran forward, seized the steering wheel, guided the bus back into its lane, moved the driver’s foot from the accelerator and pressed the brake until that enormous bus came safely to the curb.

He could not find the parking brake, so he turned the wheels hard toward the curb to prevent the bus from rolling away.

That is presence of mind under pressure.

Then Acie checked on the younger students, told them to contact their parents, made certain 911 had been called and went to get his grandmother, Phyllis Holland, who is a nurse.

The driver regained consciousness and received medical care. Every student made it home safely.

Acie had worked on cars with his father and enjoyed go-karting, but nothing could have completely prepared a 14-year-old boy to take control of a moving school bus.

Something had already been built inside him: courage, mechanical understanding, responsibility and the instinct to protect others.

His classmates gave him a new name:

“AC-Hero.”

That name fits.

While the world spends enormous energy telling us what is wrong with young men, Acie Holland III reminded us what can be right with them.

Fourteen students reached home because one young man recognized the danger, stepped forward and acted.

May God continue to strengthen this remarkable young man.

#AStoneGroove #SilentMajoritySpeaks

[A Gene Robinson @AlGeneRobi96834]

🚨 THIS YOUNG MAN IS A HERO.

Fourteen-year-old Acie Holland III was riding home from school, looking at his phone, when something felt wrong.

The bus had passed his stop.

Then it began accelerating.

Acie looked toward the front and saw the driver unconscious over the steering wheel. The moving bus, carrying 14 students, was drifting across the centerline toward oncoming traffic.

Acie did not scream.

He did not freeze.

He did not wait for an adult to save them.

This eighth grader ran forward, seized the steering wheel, guided the bus back into its lane, moved the driver’s foot from the accelerator and pressed the brake until that enormous bus came safely to the curb.

He could not find the parking brake, so he turned the wheels hard toward the curb to prevent the bus from rolling away.

That is presence of mind under pressure.

Then Acie checked on the younger students, told them to contact their parents, made certain 911 had been called and went to get his grandmother, Phyllis Holland, who is a nurse.

The driver regained consciousness and received medical care. Every student made it home safely.

Acie had worked on cars with his father and enjoyed go-karting, but nothing could have completely prepared a 14-year-old boy to take control of a moving school bus.

Something had already been built inside him: courage, mechanical understanding, responsibility and the instinct to protect others.

His classmates gave him a new name:

“AC-Hero.”

That name fits.

While the world spends enormous energy telling us what is wrong with young men, Acie Holland III reminded us what can be right with them.

Fourteen students reached home because one young man recognized the danger, stepped forward and acted.

May God continue to strengthen this remarkable young man.

#AStoneGroove #SilentMajoritySpeaks

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

God bless Steve Martin.

[Justin Amash @justinamash]

A special (targeted) tax break is welfare. I didn’t invent this truth, and neither did Bernie Sanders. This is a basic economic concept that libertarian economists from Bastiat and Mises to Hayek and Hazlitt have long recognized.

I have long pushed for lower taxes for everyone, not special breaks. Mathematically, a special break functions precisely like a subsidy. What matters are the results, not the method for benefiting one person at the expense of others.

When people like me say, “Don’t pick winners and losers,” we specifically mean that doing so is a form of corporate welfare.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@FreddyLA7 West Point, NY. In October with the leaves turning. Better yet, if you extend to 2nd weekend of December, there is nothing like the Army vs Navy game. The seniors are playing their last ever game before serving our nation. The two squads observe the other’s school song after.

[Barnaby Breaks History 🇺🇸 @BarnabyHistory]

🇺🇸 During World War II, American servicemen shipping out through San Francisco started a tradition at the Top of the Mark that still stands today.

A man would buy a bottle of whiskey, have a drink, then leave the rest behind the bar with a note for his unit. Anyone from the same unit who came through later could take a free shot.

The only rule: whoever finished the bottle had to buy the next one.

They called them Squadron Bottles.

Alongside the bottles sat a journal. Men left tributes, well wishes, and their names.

The custom continued through the Korean War. After the wars it slowly faded.

In 2009 a young Navy lieutenant named Mike Hall walked in, asked for the Squadron Bottle, and found none left. He bought a new one, started a fresh logbook, and brought the tradition back.

Today more than 100 Squadron Bottles sit on display at the Top of the Mark. The journals are still there too, filled with messages spanning generations.

Any service member or veteran with an ID can still walk in and take a shot from one.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

Charlotte Corday was a heroine of the French Revolution. #ribbonsofscarlet

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for @nytimes in 1932 for writing a piece he knew to false regarding the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, denying the famine it was causing. He was lauded by the consensus and had the ear of FDR. Gareth Jones was right and denounced. Be Gareth

[the Sports ON Tap @thesportsontap]

In 2003, the most hated team in the NBA did the kindest thing anyone has ever done on a basketball court.

April 25, 2003. Rose Garden, Portland. Game 3 of the first round against Dallas. The Blazers are down 2-0 and facing elimination from the moment they wake up.

That Blazers team had a nickname. The Jail Blazers.

They were, at the time, maybe the least likable team in professional sports. Arrests. Suspensions. A roster full of guys the national media treated as villains. Portland fans were exhausted by them.

Before the game, a 13 year old girl named Natalie Gilbert walks to center court to sing the national anthem in front of 19,980 people.

What nobody in the building knew is that she was sick. She had the flu. She later said she just didn't feel like herself at all that day.

She gets a few lines in.

And then her brain goes blank.

She sings "star's last gleaming" instead of "twilight's last gleaming," realizes it instantly, and stops. She looks around. She puts her hand to her face.

Thirteen years old. Twenty thousand people. National television. Frozen.

There is no worse feeling available to a human being.

And then a man walks out of the Portland huddle.

Maurice Cheeks, the head coach, minutes away from a playoff elimination game, leaves his team, walks across the floor, puts his arm around her shoulder and says, "C'mon."

Then he starts singing with her.

Now understand something. Maurice Cheeks cannot sing. At all. He is not remotely trying to rescue the performance.

He's just refusing to let a kid stand there alone.

He keeps his arm around her the whole way. He feeds her the next words. And within a few seconds, all 19,980 people in that building stand up and sing it with them.

A moment that was going to define a little girl's life in the worst possible way became the exact opposite.

Dan Patrick wrote at the time that Cheeks' simple actions had become the defining moment of the entire playoffs.

They went on Jay Leno together. CNN. Good Morning America. It became one of the first truly viral NBA moments, years before that word meant anything.

Portland lost the game. They lost the series. Cheeks finished his Blazers tenure with a fairly ordinary record and was eventually let go.

Now here's the ending.

In March 2025, almost 22 years later, Maurice Cheeks came back to Portland as an assistant coach with the New York Knicks.

The Blazers found Natalie Gilbert.

She's 35 now. Married. Goes by Natalie Zito. She's also, as it turns out, a Blazers season ticket holder.

They brought her back to sing the anthem again.

She nailed it. The whole building erupted. And the camera cut to Cheeks on the sideline, beaming like a proud father.

The two of them met before the game and hugged.

What she said afterward is why this story matters. She explained that she'd been made fun of a lot as a kid, and that in the moment she felt most helpless and hopeless, a stranger walked right over with no hesitation.

"This moment changed my life."

And then she said something even better. That she wouldn't go back and change any of it. That seeing him again and finding out he's still the same standup guy proved it was all real.

Twenty two years. One arm around a shoulder.

Follow @thesportsontap, we post a story like this every day.

[TxAgAdam87 @TxAdam87]

@bropurcell @VigilantFox Rowe didn’t say “average electrician”. Rowe says a TX data center is willing to pay for some electrician jobs.
Are these entry or avg skilled electrician jobs? No. But if avg electrician can make 70k and work his way far higher with no debt, better than lib arts degree w debt.