Bex

Classical Liberal | UChicago & Oxford | Texan | Husband & Father | GWOT | Christian

[Bex @BexStreams]

Your freedom arrives as an unalienable gift from your Creator, not a grant of privilege from your government.

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

This Banksy, which appeared overnight on the side of the Royal Courts of Justice building in London, is extremely powerful.

[Bex @BexStreams]

Sa-lute!

[Dave Scarangella @DaveScarangella]

Tonight, as I do every year at this time, I’ll be raising a glass to a scared young man, who 82 years ago was preparing to go ashore on the beaches of Normandy as part of an event code-named Operation Overlord.

D-Day.

I can’t imagine what was going through his mind. I’d be scared to death and I’m sure he was too. But in that first wave was a 21-year-old Private First Class from Henry County, VA by the name of Allen Homer Sink.

Fortunately, he would survive that initial wave, participate in battle until it ended in August, then come home to marry and raise a family of four, including two daughters after the war ended.

He would also become my father-in-law until his death in 2006.

His nickname for some reason was “Hank” and when I asked him how he got it, he said some guy in the Army said he “looked like a Hank.” From the time I first met him, he was a salt-of-the-earth man who was never afraid of anything. He was a carpenter by trade, and he’d stand up on the tallest roofs, grab bumblebees with his bare hands when they tried to persuade him to move elsewhere, and never be bothered by anything.

His hands were tough and leathery, but he was a softie. He spoiled his children, complained when my mother-in-law would gripe about something involving one of his alleged misdeeds, and always thought he was fooling everybody when he snuck around the back of the house and lit a cigarette, a habit everyone opposed but he could never part himself from.

He could talk your ear off for hours at a time, and I always suggested he become a greeter at Wal-Mart when he retired because then he could talk all day to strangers and none of them would – like his wife and daughters often did – tell him to be quiet for a few moments. Yet for all his love of talking, there was one subject he just wouldn’t discuss.

June 6, 1944. Omaha Beach.

In 1998, when he was 76 years old, the subject came up again. The movie “Saving Private Ryan” came out and the beginning was gruesome. Reviews said it was incredibly realistic to what really happened that day. I asked Hank if he wanted to go see it.

“No,” he shook his head. “I don’t ever want to see any of that again.”

He did offer that he remembered the night before when troops were loaded into the boats for the amphibious assault. He said it was raining and that once everyone was in place, they gave everybody ice cream and told them to try to get some sleep. Then the next thing he knew, they were waking everybody up telling them to stay low and head for the beach.

No, that doesn’t sound like somebody drugged the ice cream. Not at all.

That’s all he would say about the subject, and he never said another word about it until the final months of his life. Alzheimer’s would gradually rob him of his mind, and as his condition deteriorated, memories of the past would briefly spill out. One evening he thought I was his commanding officer and he was back at Normandy. It is the only time I ever saw him where he appeared to be scared. Ever.

It reminds me every day of something I had unknowingly taken for granted. The greatest generation did fight in and win World War II, then did incredible things over the next 50 to 60 years after the war. But many carried unspeakable memories from the War, ones they would never talk about and carry inside them to their graves. Those veterans lost a piece of themselves in battle they would never, ever, get back.

I mean, how can you at the tender age of 21 storm a beach, see friends die only a few feet from you, wonder each night if you will wake up alive the next morning and then return home a year later and try to pick up on the same normal life you had before you left? I told him once that after seeing “Saving Private Ryan”, I understood why he was never afraid of anything; after you’ve made it through something like that, everything else pales in comparison.

So tonight, I raise a glass to Hank and the 150,000-plus men, who like my father-in-law, were very young, very scared, and still charged that beach, paying a price that even for the survivors would last the rest of their days.

Rest In Peace...

[Tom Sileo @TSileo]

Very proud of our 6-year-old daughter Natalie, who has Trisomy 21, a.k.a. Down Syndrome. Is it sometimes tough raising a child with special needs? Of course, but the world is a kinder, gentler & happier place because of people like Nat. We love her! #NATitude

[Senator Jim Banks @SenatorBanks]

You have to be 16 to drive.
You have to be 18 to vote.
You have to be 21 to drink.
You have to be 25 to rent a car.

Why are teachers talking to our kids about sexuality at 12?

Why are kids encouraged to mutilate their bodies at 13?

This gender ideology madness needs to end.

[Bex @BexStreams]

Outstanding!

[Mary Margaret Olohan @MaryMargOlohan]

NEW: Five FBI employees were fired today over the infamous Richmond Catholic memo on “radical traditionalist Catholics,” FBI source confirms to @realDailyWire.

[Bex @BexStreams]

Statins are killing you.

[healthbot @thehealthb0t]

The secret to living to 100?
HIGH CHOLESTEROL

A massive Swedish study tracking over 800,000 people for 35 years just revealed: Every single centenarian had HIGH total cholesterol. The higher your LDL, the longer you live.

[Bex @BexStreams]

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

[Jo Bhakdi @JOBhakdi]

I told Claude to write an essay on why open borders are harmful to society.

It rejected it and says that's a policy violation.

Let that sink in.

@elonmusk

[Bex @BexStreams]

So the government that leaned on the private sector to deplatform and censor opposing views and opinions over COVID is now going to be given the power of AI and ownership in it -- no more middleman, no more inefficient delays in violating individual rights?

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

NEW: OpenAI & the White House are reportedly in talks over a possible government stake in the AI startup.

[Bex @BexStreams]

We are all made in the image of God. That image is not related to your IQ, or your capabilities, but rather, to your responsibilities: to love Him with all your heart, to love one another as you love yourself, and to glorify Him and His creation in all your deeds and words.

[TONY™ @TONYxTWO]

People with Down syndrome are some of the most beautiful humans on planet earth

So sad that some people cannot see this

[Bex @BexStreams]

@w4usnret @HiddenHistoryYT Thanks, Mike, I will!

[Bex @BexStreams]

Greet the janitor with the same enthusiasm you do the CEO.

[Leni @Leni1680234]

The higher you rise, the more humble you should become.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.

What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.

First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.

Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.

June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.

The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.

The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.

So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.

Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.

But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.

So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.

The secret held until the war ended.

Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.

And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.

She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.

[Bex @BexStreams]

Why should we expect that? Why should we even want that? If you want your heart touched by writing, read the writing of something with a heart --- a human.

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

A.I. writing has its share of telltale signs: copious em dashes, tortured similes and metaphors, and conspicuous verbs. Yet more advanced models are falling into a new trap: emptiness. Even when asked to mimic the styles of great writers, Claude prefers to generate passages in which characters idly touch furniture in empty hallways and nothing at all seems to happen. Can A.I. produce writing we actually want to read? It’s not looking likely, Jay Caspian Kang writes. Read about his hope for the future of writing: https://t.co/oZf4qxUnRv

[Bex @BexStreams]

What do you see?

[IMPERATOR @IMPERATORAUS]

Over the last century, Western civilisation has drifted into a state of hyper‑feminisation, and nowhere more visible than in its politics.

Putting aside any critique of women's rights or the feminist movement itself, this is a critique of the operating temperament we have allowed to dominate our societies.

Advocacy, dialogue, and empathy have their rightful place, but so do justice, war, and order.

One cannot be elevated at the expense of the other since all excesses, as Aristotle reminds us, are disordered and therefore vicious.

[Bex @BexStreams]

The struggle is the success, and the process the point. AI allows people to jump to the end screen, where the answer appears but the value of cogent effort has been stolen.

[UI/UX Savior @UiSavior]

😆

[Bex @BexStreams]

New IQ test just dropped.

[Daily Mail @DailyMail]

New 'AI vaccine' could protect against ALL viruses including Covid and Ebola: 'Cutting-edge jab technology is future proofed against new mutations' https://t.co/1P9oVo2mjo

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Needed to pull out an important part of the interview.

AI is often justified by comparing it to Amazon Web Services' ($57bn) or Uber's ($32bn) losses, when its costs/losses are hundreds of billions of dollars worse.

There'll also be little useful infrastructure left behind.

[John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre]

This is justice in a blue state (New York).

State Trooper Christopher Baldner pulls over a family SUV for speeding on the Thruway.

Driver Tristin Goods refuses to show ID and escalates the stop. Trooper uses pepper spray.

Driver floors it and flees at high speed.
Trooper follows training and uses pit maneuver to ram the vehicle and stop the threat.

The SUV crashes. Goods’ own 11-year-old daughter Monica is tragically killed.

Result?

Trooper Baldner was just sentenced to ~7 years in prison for manslaughter.

The father - who caused the deadly chase - walks free after claiming he was “scared for his life.”

[Britta | NoSoup4Knowles @nosoup4knowles]

JEREMY BOREING to Gen Z:

"Revolution offers you the world if you'll just tear down the past...but it's a lie that has destroyed every civilization foolish enough to listen to it. The American answer, the biblical answer, is to honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Build on what you've been given. Keep what works, fix what doesn't, and hand the next generation a structure that's a little stronger, a little better, and a little more humane."