Brad

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

Senator Elizabeth Warren is now demanding an investigation into Elon Musk and SpaceX over Musk “blocking” Ukraine from using his Starlink network to attack the Russians.

As a private citizen in the United States, and as someone who supports Ukraine and the Ukrainian people 100%, if I knew that Ukraine was going to use something I created in order to potentially kills hundreds of Russian soldiers, I too would be hesitant.

If I knew that my creation could be used to potentially start a nuclear war, I too would be hesitant. I don’t think it’s right for the US government to investigate a private American citizen for turning down a request by a foreign government to use their technology to attack another foreign country.

Ukraine has benefitted tremendously from Starlink. Musk has done a lot to help the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian military. As someone who leans more to the left, I believe that this move by Warren is disingenuous and unwarranted.

What are your thoughts?

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This is a beautiful letter from Fiona Apple explaining to her fans why she must postpone a concert date.

I am impressed at the way she was instantly able to make the decision to choose love over her career. Indeed, the world needs more of this.

Enjoy the story...

“It's 6pm on Friday, and I'm writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet. I'm writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here's the thing.

I have a dog, Janet, and she's been ill for about 2 years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She's almost 14 years old now. I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then — an adult, officially — and she was my kid.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She's almost 14 and I've never seen her start a fight, or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She's a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact. We've lived in numerous houses, and joined a few makeshift families, but it's always really been just the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me, all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she's used to me being gone for a few weeks, every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison's Disease, which makes it more dangerous for her to travel, since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all this, she's effortlessly joyful & playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago. She is my best friend, and my mother, and my daughter, my benefactor, and she's the one who taught me what love is.

I can't come to South America. Not now. When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn't even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she's not sad about aging or dying.

Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That's why they are so much more present than people.

But I know she is coming close to the time where she will stop being a dog, and start instead to be part of everything. She'll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can't leave her now, please understand. If I go away again, I'm afraid she'll die and I won't have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.
Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes just to decide what socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us. I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love & friendship.

I am the woman who stays home, baking Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend. And helps her be comfortable and comforted and safe and important.

I need to do my damnedest, to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I've ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and I am revelling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel. And I'm asking for your blessing.
I'll be seeing you.

Love,
Fiona”

[ByBulletBombandDagger 🗡️🔫🇺🇲 @DaggerAndBullet]

The "Just. One. Mile." documentary on the Mid-State Mile race is excellent.

In case you needed watch recommendation.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

KISS OF LIFE

In 1968, the author received the Pulitzer Prize for this photograph - one of the most prestigious awards in the United States, which is awarded for achievements in music, cinema, theater and journalism.

The picture shows two electricians, Randall Champion and Jay Thompson, hanging from a power pole. That day there was a strong heat and nothing foreshadowed trouble. The hum of air conditioners in July 1967 was heard throughout the state of Florida. Because of them, in the city of Jacksonville, there was an overload of power lines, and this caused a power surge.

Randall and Jay were doing routine maintenance on a live line when Randall accidentally touched one of the wires. A discharge of 4000 V passed through the body and his heart stopped. For understanding: during the execution in the electric chair, a voltage of 2000 V is used

Randall's lifeless body hung from the harness. But his partner Jay did not lose his head, realizing that every second is precious, he began to give him artificial respiration right on the pole. It was very inconvenient, but there was no other way out. In such a situation, it is difficult to conduct a normal resuscitation, but Jay still tried to start his friend's heart until he had a weak pulse.

Only after that he unhooked his partner's insurance and, throwing him over his shoulder, went down to the ground. By the time the rescuers arrived (they were called by professional photographer Rocco Morabito, who happened to be at the scene), Champion was already conscious on the ground.
Not only was he saved, thanks to Thompson, but he lived another 35 years. The electrician died in 2003 at the age of 64.

Thompson is alive today.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

"I have found that some of the simplest things have given me the most pleasure"⁠ said Dick Proenneke.

⁠For 30 years, Dick Proenneke lived in complete isolation in a cabin he built by hand on the shores of Alaska's Twin Lakes. With no telephone, electricity, or even running water, he lived the sort of life that's unimaginable in the modern world.
After an eye injury that threatened to leave him blind in the late 1960s Proenneke wanted to put down roots far from civilization by building his own cabin amid the natural beauty of the Twin Lakes region.

Proenneke arrived at Upper Twin Lake in 1967 at the age of 51 determined to scout out the best construction site for his cabin.

A master craftsman, he used local materials, simple tools, and human ingenuity to craft a home and life in keeping with the wilderness. He harvested spruce trees that summer and in 1968 began construction on what would become his cabin and wilderness home during the next thirty years.

[Brad @bradestes]

@CohenSite Legend

[Peter Schiff @PeterSchiff]

The 30-year, fixed-rate #mortgage peaked at 18.45% in Oct. 1981 and troughed at 2.65% in 2021. The current rate is 7.4% and rising. 40 years of falling mortgage rates, plus married women entering the workforce, allowed home prices to rise much faster than incomes. Look out below!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill.

No limit.

Please let us know.

[Ronny Jackson @RonnyJacksonTX]

If Diane Feinstein can't make it through a simple roll call vote, there's NO WAY she understands what's in the bills she's voting into law. It's time for her to step aside and leave the Senate. This has gone on long enough!!

[Victor Davis Hanson @VDHanson]

Special Counsel Jack Smith added new indictments against Donald Trump, among them conspiratorially “unlawfully discounting  legitimate votes.” Was Smith here referencing Stacy Abrams who for years claimed she was the real governor of Georgia, barnstorming the country to overturn the vote count?

Or maybe Smith referred to ex-president Jimmy Carter? He “discounted” the 2016 vote by claiming Trump won only due to the “Russians”? Or did Smith mean Hillary Clinton who discounted Trump as an “illegitimate” president, prompting her to join the “Resistance” against an elected president?

Or maybe Smith meant the Hollywood crowd who cut commercials after the 2016 election, begging viewers to pressure the electors to refuse their constitutional duties to honor their states’ popular vote, and instead in insurrectionary fashion vote for Hillary Clinton?

Or was Smith thinking of the 32 Democratic House members and Sen. Barbara Boxer in January 2005 who tried to toss out the legally certified vote in Ohio to swing the election to John Kerry?

Or maybe Smith was referencing Molly Ball’s 2021 Time essay? She bragged of the 2020 “cabal” and “conspiracy” hatched by Democrats, Silicon Valley, and corporatists to spend half-a-billion  dollars to change state voting laws, censor the news, modulate the 2020 street protests, and absorb the work of state precinct workers?

[Brad @bradestes]

Day whatever and I still scroll past the X icon before remembering it changed. Maybe another week?

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

This is not Apple, Nvidia or even Tesla. It’s Congress members over the age of 70

[RNC Research @RNCResearch]

FLASHBACK TO 2019:

Biden freaks out on a farmer who asks about his family’s corrupt foreign business deals — calling him “a damn liar,” “fat,” and “too old,” and challenging him to an “IQ test” and push-up contest.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

-Never forget that Viktor Shokin’s Office told Burisma’s CEO that there was no case against him in 2015.
- Never forget that Republican Senators literally sent a letter to Ukraine’s President around the same time Biden pushed to get the prosecutor fired (Feb of 2016), also telling Ukraine to reform the Prosecutor generals office.
- Never forget that the Obama/Biden administration criticized Shokin multiple times in 2015 for not helping the UK investigate Burisma before Shokin was fired.
- Never forget that Shokin and other Ukrainian prosecutors refused to cooperate with the Burisma investigation in the UK.
- Never forget that Zlochevsky said that the Biden’s didn’t bribe him.
- Never forget that Lev Parnas was involved in all this and Congress refuses to let him testify.
- Never forget that Democrats and Republicans supported the firing of Shokin in 2015-2016, as did most of Europe, and the IMF.

[The Epoch Times @EpochTimes]

"Every Democrat on this committee believes that we need to end that polarization. Do you think you can do that by censoring people? I'm telling you, you can not."

@RobertKennedyJr pushes back against accusations that he is anti-Semetic. https://t.co/PITWsdW9jL

[Sen. Marsha Blackburn @MarshaBlackburn]

Retweet if you think the American people deserve to know the truth about the Biden family’s alleged crimes.

[Brad @bradestes]

@DeptofDefense @USArmy I’m at a loss for words. This should not be the focus of our military.

[@Chicago1Ray 🇺🇸 @Chicago1Ray]

(RT) if you think the last person who should be talking about Affirmative Action is someone who's on record as saying this 👇

[The Vigilant Fox 🦊 @VigilantFox]

.@ElonMusk Takes Aim at Advertisers for Undermining and Corrupting Democracy

“We have ... seen roughly half of our advertising disappear overnight simply because we insist on free speech,” shared @ElonMusk.

“I think the public does not realize the magnitude of the pressure, extreme financial pressure, that is placed upon organizations to toe the line by advertisers,” he continued.

“And I think this is a fundamental corruption of democracy, and the public should be absolutely outraged by this. And something’s got to be done about it. It’s insane. They’re literally trying to drive Twitter bankrupt.”