The River Dweller

Wildflower Farmer, bees, teacher, trained microbiologist, classical musician, goat herder. “Science and Faith are not mutually exclusive”

[The River Dweller @ZeeMagistra]

@RepPettersen Guess what. They are illegal. Sorry not sorry. I voted for this

[BostonWriter @bostonwriter]

If this sort of thing doesn’t stop you in your tracks and make even the slightest twinge of pride rise in your soul… well… I feel sorry for you.

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work.

He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in.

Two years later, it was over. 🧵

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Everyone seems convinced they are living through uniquely stressful times. They are, in fact, living through the most comfortable era in human history, and the gap between those two facts is quietly ruining them.

Look at what you actually woke up to. A warm bed, a roof that held, a tap that gave clean water without a three mile walk to a well, a fridge holding more calories than a medieval village saw in a week. No plague at the door, no army on the ridge, no steward come to take a third of your grain for a lord you never met. The chance that you or anyone you love dies this year of an infected cut is, by the standards of almost everyone who ever lived, a rounding error.

Now measure that against how you feel. Wired, braced, worn out by things that have not happened, a generation with heating and antibiotics and same-day delivery, privately certain it endures the hardest conditions anyone ever has.

The truth is less flattering, and facing it squarely is the whole point. Our ancestors carried far more stress than we do, and carried it better, and the reasons we cannot are worth naming plainly.

The first is diet. Most people run on a blood sugar rollercoaster and a low simmer of inflammation, so the nervous system is already jangling before a single real problem arrives.

The second is lifestyle. We have stripped every scrap of deliberate hardship from ordinary life, so the first genuine difficulty finds a body that has never once been asked to cope.

The third is the strangest. We have taken to adopting every disaster on earth as a personal emergency. A famine two continents away. A feud between strangers. An outrage you will have forgotten by Friday. You pour a finite store of nervous energy into all of it, then wonder why nothing is left for your own life, the small handful of things you could actually change.

The Stoics drew a tight circle around that handful: your judgements, your effort, your conduct. Everything outside it, which is very nearly everything, they treated as weather. Have opinions about weather if you like. Try to be personally responsible for it and you go straight under.

Here is the part they leave off the posters. All three causes are yours to reverse. You can eat the way people ate before any of this. You can put hardship back into your week on purpose. You can let the planet's misfortunes carry on without your sponsorship, because they always would have.

You were not born fragile. You were softened, slowly, by decades of comfort doing exactly what comfort does. Seeing that plainly is the first honest thing you can do. Owning it as yours to fix is the second, and the whole business starts turning the moment you stop waiting for someone else to start it.

[Ann Bauer @annbauerwriter]

I almost don't want to tell you how beautiful Medora, ND, is because that will mean I have to deal with bigger crowds. The wilds of the Badlands - of all the places on earth it is my spiritual home. I understand exactly why Teddy Roosevelt protected the area the way he did.

[Conservatron @Conservatron1]

Yes. America has it all.
Literally.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. I've spent twenty years as the person patients trust to interpret their bodies. And I need to tell you something that most physicians won't say out loud:

AI is about to change the power dynamic between you and your doctor. Forever.

Four days ago, OpenAI's o3 model diagnosed 18 children with rare diseases that the best human specialists at Boston Children's Hospital couldn't solve — some after nearly twenty years of searching. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Two weeks ago, WashU researchers proved that nine routine blood markers can calculate your biological age — and predict cancer risk years before any tumor forms. A free calculator. Available to anyone.

Last month, AI-enhanced coronary CT angiography detected inflamed arteries in patients whose standard stress tests said "normal." Patients who would have gone home reassured and wrong.
The pattern is unmistakable. The tools that used to require a specialist, a referral, a three-month wait, and a $400 copay are migrating into your phone, your bloodwork portal, and your own hands.

And I'm watching something in my practice I never expected.
Patients are walking in more informed than some of the residents I trained. They've run their PhenoAge score. They know their ApoB. They've read the study about Lp(a) before I've had time to bring it up. They come with questions so specific that the conversation starts at a level it took me years of training to reach.
This used to threaten physicians. It shouldn't. It should liberate us.
Because here's the truth about the old model: a 15-minute appointment where your doctor runs a basic metabolic panel, glances at the numbers, says "looks fine," and sends you home — that model was never good enough. It was just all we had. It missed 75% of future heart attacks. It caught cancer late. It told women with microvascular disease they had anxiety. It filed children with rare diseases as "unsolvable."

AI doesn't replace the physician. I've said this before and I mean it — the human moment, the clinical judgment, the hand on the shoulder when the diagnosis lands — that's irreplaceable.

But AI does something the old model never could: it gives you the ability to see inside your own biology with a depth and speed that was impossible a decade ago. To track your own numbers. To calculate your own biological age. To bring data to your doctor that elevates the conversation from "am I sick?" to "where exactly am I heading, and what do we do about it?"

The patient who walks in with their ApoB, their Lp(a), their hsCRP, their PhenoAge calculation, and a list of questions from the latest research — that patient doesn't threaten me.

That patient is the easiest person in my practice to keep alive.
Because they've already done the one thing most patients never do: they stopped waiting for permission to understand their own body.

I went into medicine because I wanted to help people live longer. What I've learned is that the patients who live longest are the ones who took ownership — not of my job, but of their own data, their own questions, and their own decisions.

The tools are here. The research is published. The calculators are free. The blood tests cost less than a dinner out.

You don't need to wait for your annual physical to find out what's happening inside you. You don't need permission to understand your own biology. And you don't need to accept "looks fine" from anyone — including me — when the science offers a deeper answer.

The revolution isn't coming. It's in your pocket. In your patient portal. In the published studies you can read yourself.

The only question left is whether you'll use it — or keep waiting for someone to tell you it's time.
Your body. Your data. Your life.

Take ownership. Your future self is counting on it.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Both Christianity and Islam make peace with death. Both traditions promise resurrection, and both produce men who face execution without flinching. If you stop there the comparison seems clean, but it does not stop there.

The question that matters is not whether a tradition is comfortable with death. The question is what it does with that comfort. Which direction does the fearlessness travel?

In Gethsemane, the night Jesus was arrested, Peter drew his sword and cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant.
This is a crucial moment. Peter was not being reckless; he was being logical. He knew they were going to die, they all did. But his drawn sword was making the calculation every soldier in history has made: if I am going to die regardless, I will take someone with me.

That is Khalid ibn al-Walid’s theology compressed into one gesture in a garden. You will die anyway, so make your death count against your enemies.

But Jesus stopped Peter. He rebuked him, healed the man’s ear, and submitted to the arrest. Then he was executed without calling down the legions of angels that were his to command. Jesus was God incarnate, sovereign over the cosmos, and he made a deliberate decision to let them take him. He was not trapped. He chose. The restraint is not incidental to the faith. The restraint is the faith.

That choice becomes the DNA of Christianity.

Paul writes 2 Corinthians having already received what he calls a literal death sentence. Beaten, stoned, and hunted across the Mediterranean, the early church had no army and no political cover. Every one of them faced the same question Peter faced in the garden: if we are dying anyway, why not take someone with us?

But they did not. Paul reads his death sentence and writes: “But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God who raises the dead.” He presents a God of comfort, not conquest. The assured afterlife produces endurance, not aggression.

Now read the quote in this tweet.

Khalid ibn al-Walid, a year after Muhammad’s death, marching a Muslim army into Persian territory. This was not a defensive dispatch. This was a conquering general delivering an ultimatum to an empire: “Convert, pay the tax, or face men who love death more than you love life.”

The structure of that sentence is identical to the logic every jihadist since has deployed. Every man who has ever boarded a plane, strapped on a vest, or driven into a crowd has carried this exact internal grammar: we do not fear death. Our afterlife is assured. Therefore your life is leverage and our death is a weapon. The difference between Khalid and the modern terrorist is tactical, not theological.

Both traditions stand before death without flinching. Christianity turns that fearlessness inward, toward endurance and the willingness to absorb suffering rather than inflict it. Islam turns it outward, toward ultimatum, and the transformation of death into a threat held at someone else’s throat.

Jesus stopped Peter in the garden. That single moment contains the entire argument. The Christian faith was crystallized in the precise instant when a man with every justification and every capacity for violence sheathed his sword, healed his enemy’s wound, and walked into the dark.

There is no equivalent moment in Muhammad’s biography. The arc runs the exact opposite direction. You have the same absence of fear, but a completely different God.

[Sarah Salviander @sarahsalviander]

You can't squash the religious impulse. If you remove God, it will just manifest in other ways.

In secular religion, there is abundant guilt and atonement, but little love and forgiveness. The rituals of atonement are harsh, sometimes to the point of death. Mercy? You deserve no mercy. The Earth will not take the punishment for your sins as Christ did. You will. You are the sacrifice for the sins of humankind.

If you don't know what this is about: France has already recorded 1,000 excess deaths due to the recent record-breaking heat wave. The use of AC has been politicized in Europe to the point that that most everyone, including vulnerable people, are discouraged from using it even as conditions become intolerable. Why? Because of carbon emissions. Even as China releases 2x more emissions than the entire EU, the EU must sacrifice. You can't convince me this isn't pagan religion without the supernatural.

[Eric Matheny 🎙️ @ericmmatheny]

Name one country - other than the US - where a foreigner can get temporary protected status - and stay for 16 years - refuse to assimilate, condemn the host country for not catering to the foreign culture, collect welfare, and then call the host country oppressive and intolerant.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

They say “America has no culture” and what they mean is that the Constitution and Bill of Rights, English common law, the language itself, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July, the nuclear family, the work ethic, rock n roll, country, plus every innovation that turned this place into the world’s superpower don’t count as real culture.

It’s just “whiteness,” this blank or oppressive thing that exists only to be critiqued and replaced.

And this line has become so dominant, so institutionalized in schools, media, HR departments, and elite culture that it’s now the standard water everybody swims in.
Most people don’t even clock it anymore because it’s treated like obvious truth instead of the radical self-erasure project it actually is.

But this isn’t a good faith argument at all, and it carries clear ulterior motives to justify the erasure of America’s historic core and the people who built it.

Because once you get Americans to accept that their culture is either nonexistent or evil, then mass demographic change, open borders, and tearing down the old traditions suddenly look like moral progress instead of an existential attack on everything that made the country function in the first place.

The reality though is that America has one of the strongest and most distinctive cultures on earth, forged from Western and Christian roots and supercharged by liberty and merit.
And the World Cup visitors are reminding us of exactly that right now.

Germans are going viral saying if you want to hate America watch the news but drive through it and meet the actual people.

Europeans are shocked by how genuinely warm, friendly, and generous Americans are in real life and can’t stop talking about the hospitality and customer service.

Japanese fans are writing poetry about unlimited free chips and salsa, while others are losing it over Texas brisket, ranch dressing on everything, Waffle House at 2 am, Buc-ee’s, the ridiculous size of Walmart, and free drink refills that never end.

These outsiders are cutting straight through the institutionalized narrative and showing us what we’ve been gaslit into taking for granted, and that is an abundant, open, high trust, high energy culture that actually works. Americans built it, they live it every day, and they are not apologizing for it or handing it over.

[The River Dweller @ZeeMagistra]

@mellifera_x3 I just got back from Japan and lmaoooo THIS! 😂😂 CRUMBLES OF TP in the asscrack. I’m laughing every time you reply to someone with this. It’s my only small complaint and I thought maybe it’s just me..😂😂

[Senator Dave McCormick @SenMcCormickPA]

Proud to partner with @SenFettermanPA, @SecRollins and a host of Pennsylvania organizations to showcase the very best of PA at the Great American State Fair 🇺🇸

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

My American friends invited me to dinner. It was wonderful.

Then, at 9 o'clock, someone said the sacred words: "Well! We should get going."

I rose. I gathered my coat. A clean farewell. We would part now.

We did not part now.

This was not a goodbye. This was the ANNOUNCEMENT of a goodbye.
A goodbye, I would learn, has many stages, and we had completed only the first.

For we then talked, standing, for twenty more minutes.
About a road. About the road they would take to drive home.
The conversation about leaving had become longer than the dinner.

We reached the door. "Okay! Goodnight!" Surely now.

No. At the door, a SECOND conversation began. A fresh one.
Someone remembered a story. We laughed. We were not leaving. We were thriving.

We moved to the porch. Stage three. The night air. New topics emerged.
The host, in his socks, in the cold, would not go back inside while a guest remained.
The guest would not get in the car while the host stood in the cold. A perfect deadlock of courtesy.

We reached the cars. Stage four. The driveway summit. The final boss.
Standing by the open car door, we discussed, in depth, plans to do this again —
the very event we were currently, allegedly, ending.

It was now 10:30. The "goodbye" was ninety minutes old. It had outlived the meal.

I understand it now. The long goodbye is not a failure to leave.
It is the meal's dessert. The reluctance IS the affection, made visible and stretched as long as it will go.

So I have learned to honor it.

Last week I left a friend's house.
The goodbye was so warm, so complete, so beautifully extended,
that we finished it standing in his driveway at midnight,
and I was so moved I invited him to MY house —

and he is here now. We are having dinner.

I can see, in his eyes, he is already thinking about the road home.

[Khaled Hassan @Khaledhzakariah]

I was never a practising, observant Muslim.

Yet, even I wanted Islam to take over Europe and the West until I was a teenager.

We are taught that Islam's greatest achievements are conquest and colonialism.

We are taught that the greatest thing we could ever do is enable the invasion and conquest of non-Muslim countries.

This is a fact that only a former Muslim would tell you.

[M.A. Franklin @FoundationDads]

Recently a popular YouTube, a godless agnostic, listens to the entire Bible and was amazed at how much literature it opened up for him. Formerly obtuse references were made clear. Symbols became enlightening rather than confusing. Almost every piece of modern Western literature he had read, even sci-fi and fantasy, suddenly made so much more sense.

It was like being given a secret key.

The fact he wasn't taught the Bible when a child means he wasn't properly educated. Period.

If you live in the West, it's absurd to claim otherwise.

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

Let’s get off the keyboards and talk in person then John. I’ll fly you first class down to my studio. 2 hour flight from DC. I’ll pay for your security too if you require it. Let’s discuss these rules & precedents. I’ll also make a $10k donation to a mutually agreed worthy cause.

[The River Dweller @ZeeMagistra]

@TaraBull It’s called the Ring of Fire for a reason

[Nancy Mace @NancyMace]

Liberal white women scream about The Handmaid's Tale, then vote the real version into existence.

[U.S. Senator John Fetterman @SenFettermanPA]

Anti-Israel.

Anti-America.

Anti-Western Civilization.

Why am I the only Democrat in the U.S. Senate that refuses to excuse this or defend any of those self-identified communists?